The 1980s promised robotic servants were in reach. They’d clean up our houses. Bring us drinks. Usher in an era of leisure. We didn’t get robot butlers. But if we look around, we’ll find an army of robotic servants already automating away domestic drudgery.
Due to some early information floating around some outlets reported that the Steam Deck will play every single game out there but anyone who has played games on Linux knows that would be impossible, proton is frankly not at this state.
A screencast in which we take a look at notes about Linux I have saved over the last few years.
Choosing The Right ZFS Pool Layout, changes in OpenBSD that make life better, GhostBSD 21.09.06 ISO's now available, Fair Internet bandwidth management with OpenBSD, NetBSD wifi router project update, NetBSD on the Apple M1, HardenedBSD August Status Report, FreeBSD Journal on Wireless and Desktop, and more.
This week we’ve been playing with Steam and the Windows Terminal. We look back at how Ubuntu and evolved over the years, bring you some command line love and go over all your feedback.
It’s Season 14 Episode 28 of the Ubuntu Podcast! Alan Pope, Mark Johnson and Martin Wimpress are connected and speaking to your brain.
Linux celebrates its 30th birthday on September 17th and the system house B1 Systems, which specializes in open source, wants to share its joy with open source and social projects: The team around the penguin mascot is donating a total of 30,000 euros.
Half of the total goes to social projects. No recipient has yet been determined for the remaining 15,000 euros. Open source fans can now choose which open source projects or non-profit associations that promote open source will receive the money.
I'm announcing the release of the 5.14.5 kernel.
This, and the other stable kernels released today, consist of only some reverts to solve some reported problems with the last round of stable releases. Upgrading is not required, but highly recommended.
The updated 5.14.y git tree can be found at: git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git linux-5.14.y and can be browsed at the normal kernel.org git web browser: https://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-s...
thanks,
greg k-h
Updating the BIOS/UEFI binary usually requires a reboot, but Intel is working on changing that, at least on Linux servers for now, with the Intel Seamless Update aiming to carry out system firmware updates (e.g. UEFI) at run-time without having to reboot, a bit like what Canonical does with the Ubuntu Livepatch service, but at a lower level in the software stack.
Intel submitted a patch that “Introduces Platform Firmware Runtime Update and Telemetry drivers” to the Linux kernel mailing list a couple of days ago with the description reading in part:
High Service Level Agreements (SLAs) requires that the system runs without service interruptions. Generally, system firmware provides runtime services such as RAS (Reliability, Availability and Serviceability) features, UEFI runtime services and ACPI services. Currently if there is any firmware code changes in these code area, the system firmware update and reboot is required. Example of bug fix could be wrong register size or location of the register. This means customer services are not available during the firmware upgrade, which could approach several minutes, resulting in not able to meet SLAs.
With the Linux 5.15 merge window out of the way, the first drm-misc-next pull request has been sent in to DRM-Next for staging until the Linux 5.16 merge window opens up about two months from now.
With this initial drm-misc-next pull the material is rather light considering the brief time since the merge window. There are some DMA-BUF updates, new macros, a number of new device quirks, documentation improvements, the V3D driver has a fix for a Vulkan CTS failure, new PCI IDs for the Bochs driver, VirtIO now supports mapping exported vRAM, and the ZTE driver has been removed for being obsolete.
Linux 5.15-rc1 performance overall has been looking good at the assortment of systems I have tested so far this week. The performance overall has been inline with expectations and jiving well with the many new Linux 5.15 features. But it quickly became apparent that something was wrong with compiler performance when running on Linux 5.15... Not the speed to compile the kernel, but rather the performance of building other codebases while the system is running Linux 5.15-rc1. This slowdown for build tests was happening for multiple codebases of very real-world and relevant projects and on multiple systems, making it an interesting regression to look at and worth bisecting for an article.
Following the big OpenZFS 2.1 release from July that brought Distributed SPARE RAID, a compatibility property for pools, and other new features, OpenZFS 2.1.1 is available today as a follow-up release for this open-source ZFS file-system implementation for Linux and FreeBSD systems.
Prominent Intel open-source Vulkan Linux driver developer Jason Ekstrand presented at today's X.Org Developers Conference (XDC2021) about their work on enabling Vulkan ray-tracing support.
As has been covered many times already, with forthcoming Xe-HPG graphics card will feature hardware ray-tracing capabilities. While Windows users are getting excited over DirectX 12 DXR prospects with Intel graphics, on the Linux side that is obviously focused on the Vulkan ray-tracing extensions.
Those reading Phoronix over the years likely know the X.Org Server has had an increasing number of vulnerabilities come to light in recent times and statements by security researchers like the security being even worse than it looks. Given the age of the X.Org/X11 codebase and many components being rather unmaintained these days, the security situation isn't that great combined with a lack of manpower. The security topic was under the spotlight today at the XDC2021 conference.
It's been known that Google has been using the open-source "MSM" DRM/KMS driver on Qualcomm-powered devices that originally started out as a reverse-engineered driver project separate from the company. Now it's also been confirmed how Google is successfully using the open-source Mesa Freedreno OpenGL and TURNIP Vulkan drivers on Qualcomm-powered Chromebooks too.
The latest work landing for Mesa 21.3 is supporting FP16 within the LLVM-based software driver code namely for the LLVMpipe Gallium3D OpenGL and Lavapipe Vulkan drivers.
VK_KHR_shader_float16_int8 and VK_KHR_shader_subgroup_extended_types are now exposed for the LLVMpipe code with this OpenGL FP16 support in place. The Lavapipe Vulkan code is similarly exposing this FP16 support too.
The free open-source Lightroom alternative, Darktable release version 3.6.1. Here’s what’s new and how to install it in Ubuntu.
Darktable 3.6.1 comes with stability improvements and bug-fixes. No new features, but has new camera support, including base support for Leica C-Lux (3:2), Sony ILCE-7RM3A, Sony ILCE-7RM4A, Nikon D6 (12bit and 14bit), and Nikon Z fc (12bit- and 14bit-compressed). The release also adds noise profile for Ricoh GR III.
And here are the bug-fixes according to the release note...
Macast is a new free and open source tool to use your computer as a DLNA media renderer, so you can cast videos, pictures and music from your phone (or another computer) to your desktop, kind of like a Chromecast. It's available for Linux, Microsoft Windows and macOS.
The application is very easy to use, shipping with only a tray menu (without any other GUI) from where you can control it, and it uses mpv as the media player. A few days ago, Macast has added the ability to use other media players via plugins, with 3 such plugins being available right now (for IINA on macOS, pi-fm-rds for Raspberry Pi and PotPlayer for Microsoft Windows). You can also write your own plugin.
See how the watch command can let you know when a task has been completed or a command has been executed.
Welcome back to LearnLinuxTV's full course on Proxmox Virtual Environment! In class #8, we look at the process of converting a container into a template, that can then be used as a basis for launching additional containers.
Earlier this year, allotropia software GmbH was awarded a tender to fix a number of problems around the master document feature (Tender to implement master document fixes (#202106-02)) by The Document Foundation (TDF).
We have finished implementing the necessary changes, and all fixes will be available for testing in LibreOffice 7.2.2.
Using master documents is a somewhat hidden, but extremely useful feature of LibreOffice Writer, when producing longer documents (like books, or the help guides the LibreOffice documentation team is maintaining). With it, users can split a larger document into a number of smaller pieces, to work on independently. If this feature sounds interesting to you, the excellent Writer Guide has a chapter about it.
The echo command is one of the most commonly and widely used built-in commands for Linux bash and C shells, that typically used in a scripting language and batch files to display a line of text/string on standard output or a file.
Add Plex repository for Linux and Plex Media Server will automatically get updated.
Conky is a system monitor tool for the Linux desktop. With it, users can view everything from their RAM usage, CPU usage, disk usage, and more right on the desktop. Here’s how to get it working on your system.
In this video, we are looking at how to install Zoom on Linux Lite 5.4.
Have you ever started a script that needs to run for an extended period of time? Maybe you kicked off a job and it is still running next time you log in? Whatever the situation is, there may be times when it is necessary to check how long a process has been running in Linux. In this short tutorial we will discuss using the ps command to show elapsed time since a process was started.
Every time you start a process on a Linux system it is assigned a process id (PID). The system keeps track of this process, it’s elapsed time, and other important information using this process id. Before we can find out how long a process has been running we need to find its PID.
Today we are looking at how to install FNF Battle Royale Mod 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.
If you have any questions, please contact us via a YouTube comment and we would be happy to assist you!
Communication platforms like Microsoft Teams have become an integral part of everyone's day-to-day lives. From organizing team meetings in corporates to scheduling classes in educational institutions, Microsoft Teams is used everywhere. But is it available to Linux users?
As Linux server administrators, we need to be able to schedule tasks to run at some point in the future. Perhaps as a one-off command, or a job that's expected to repeat on some sort of schedule.
Nagios is a popular and one of the most powerful open-source computer monitoring systems. It keeps track of your IT infrastructure and ensures that your networks, servers, applications, and processes are running smoothly. Using a monitoring system allows you to identify problems before they occur and deploy fixes quickly resulting in saving of cost and downtime.
In this tutorial, you will learn how to install and configure Nagios on a CentOS 8 based server. We will also do some basic configuration and install Nagios Remote Plugin Executor(NPRE), which will allow us to monitor remote hosts.
Wiki.js is an open-source wiki software written in JavaScript and running on the Node.js runtime, it's released under the APGL-v3 license. Wiki.js is a lightweight, and powerful wiki software with a beautiful and intuitive user interface, it's designed for the modern web. Wiki.js is very extensible wiki software and suitable for different types of documents and deployments, it can be used for both technical and non-technical people.
Wiki.js is backed by various types of modules to extend its features and make it a powerful and extensible wiki software.
MongoDB is an object-oriented, schema-less, NoSQL database server used in developing modern dynamic apps. This implies that data objects are stored as separate documents in a collection unlike in traditional relational databases where rows and columns are used. MongoDB allows for quick traversing of nested data objects without requiring joins which improves performance greatly.
MongoDB is written in C++ for massive scalability and flexibility which offers easy querying and indexing for developers. It also provides an aggregation framework that makes it easier to query complex document-based data sets.
MongoDB has a rich and vibrant community and offers rich and powerful in-built features which include MapReduce, auto sharding among others.
MongoDB runs on all major operating system platforms such as Linux, Windows, Solaris and Mac OS X. It also supports many distributions like Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), CentOS, Ubuntu etc.
This tutorial will cover how to install MongoDB NoSQL database on Rocky Linux 8.
In Bash shell scripting, functions are ways to group the set of instructions together to get a specific outcome. You can think of functions as a mini script. Functions are also called procedures and methods in some programming languages. Functions are a great way to achieve modularity and reusability.
In this article, I will explain how to use functions in bash scripts in Linux with examples. You will be pretty comfortable in using bash functions by the end of this article.
LAMP is a popular hosting stack used for developing and testing web applications. It’s an acronym for Linux, Apache, MariaDB, & PHP.
Apache is an open-source and widely used web server. MariaDB is an open-source relational database server that stores data in tables inside databases, and PHP is a server-side scripting language used for developing dynamic web pages.
In this walkthrough, we will demonstrate the installation of the LAMP stack in AlmaLinux.
SSH (Secure SHELL) is an open-source and most trusted network protocol that is used to log in to remote servers for the execution of commands and programs. It is also used to transfer files from one computer to another computer over the network using a secure copy (SCP) command and Rsync command.
ls command is one of the most frequently used commands in Linux. I believe the ls command is the first command you may use when you get into the command prompt of Linux Box.
We use the ls command daily basis and frequently even though we may not aware and never use all the available ls command tricks.
In this video, I am going to show how to install GhostBSD 21.09.06.
Redis is an open-source in-memory database for storing data structure, caching, and as a message broker. It supports data structures such as strings, lists, sets, hashes, sorted sets with range queries, bitmaps, HyperLogLogs, and geospatial indexes with radius queries. Redis has a built-in replication feature, which makes it work as high available clusters in your production environments.
This tutorial will help you to install the Redis on Debian 11 (Bullseye) Linux system.
Kali Linux is the de facto standard of Linux distributions used for learning and practicing hacking and penetration testing.
And, if you’ve been tinkering around with Linux distros long enough, you might have tried it out just out of curiosity.
However, no matter what you use it for, it is not a replacement for a regular full-fledged desktop Linux operating system. Hence, it is recommended (at least for beginners) to install Kali Linux using a virtual machine program like VMware.
With a virtual machine, you can use Kali Linux as a regular application in your Windows or Linux system. It’s almost the same as running VLC or Skype in your system.
There are a few free virtualization tools available for you. You can install Kali Linux on Oracle VirtualBox or use VMWare Workstation.
Java is a general-purpose, class-based, object-oriented multipurpose programming language that is popular due to the design of having lesser implementation dependencies, meaning that the compiled Java code can be run on all platforms that support Java without the need for recompilation. Java is also fast, secure, and reliable, therefore. It is widely used for developing Java applications in laptops, data centers, game consoles, scientific supercomputers, cell phones, etc.
JDK 17 (OpenJDK 17) has brought forward new language enhancements, updates to the libraries, support for new Apple computers, removals and deprecations of legacy features, and work to ensure Java code written today will continue working without change in future JDK versions.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Microweber CMS on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Microweber is a free and open-source drag and drops CMS and website builder written in the PHP programming language and the Laravel Framework. Microweber’s drag-and-drop technology and real-time writing and text editing functionality provide a quick and easy way to create your content, helping turn your website into a rich environment for you to express your thoughts. It also comes with built-in storefront features, allowing you to create an e-commerce site from which you can sell your products on the Internet.
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 the step-by-step installation of Microweber CMS on Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal Fossa). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 18.04, 16.04, and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint.
OpenStack's Identity service, Keystone, verifies the user's identity and provides information about which resources the user has access to.
The Keystone project provides authentication, authorization, and other services such as delivering the service catalog, as this diagram shows...
Playable in solo or online in co-op, Pine Studio (Faraway: Director's Cut, SEUM: Speedrunners from Hell) have announced their escape room game Escape Simulator is releasing on October 19.
"Think you have what it takes to escape? Face ingenuous locks in ancient Egypt. Hack the system in an adrift space shuttle. Decipher mysterious notes in the oddball Victorian library of Edgewood Mansion. Play online with pals for double the fun. Or brave the mysteries alone, with nothing but your smarts to aid you."
[...]
The developer has confirmed that it will have full Linux support at release.
While it may be sad that Total War: WARHAMMER III has been delayed until 2022 so we've got a while to wait, we're at least getting more info on what will be included like the new Grand Cathay nation.
This is the first time for the franchise to see Grand Cathay realised in full. Originally mentioned in the second edition of Warhammer Fantasy Battles and a few random mentions, Creative Assembly teamed up with Games Workshop to pull together everything to create a full army and empire for Total War: WARHAMMER III including their own characters, units, magic, history, and much more.
Kingdom Two Crowns: Norse Lands is the latest announced expansion for the side-scrolling kingdom builder and it sounds like it's going to be quite an exciting addition.
Bringing with it a setting inspired by Norse Viking culture, it's a whole new campaign that gives you a new setting to build, defend, explore and conquer. "In Norse Lands, players can look forward to unleashing abilities drawn upon from Norse gods, commanding mighty units, building Viking- inspired armaments, solving challenging puzzles, and facing a new enemy Greed.".
Slender Threads: Prologue gives you a small slice of what to expect from the full point and click thriller and it's out now with a Linux version.
A game that at release was pretty good but clearly lacking in many areas, Nebuchadnezzar has expanded yet again with more major new game mechanics. If you bounced off it at release, it's really time to give it another look.
"Nebuchadnezzar is a classic isometric city builder game inviting players to experience the mysterious history and culture of ancient Mesopotamia. In the campaign, players get to rule over influential historical cities filled with magnificent monuments."
Combining tiny little fancy birds with skateboarding is highly unusual but it continues to show how indie developers will try things AAA won't. SkateBIRD is exactly that and it's out now.
Of course since you're only tiny, so are the skateparks which are all made from random everyday objects. You get to customize your bird too, as the developer points out that "Skateboarding is all about self-expression, and style is important no matter how small the skater. From cowboy hats, to colorful scarves and backpacks, SkateBIRD’s accessories let each skater’s personality shine. Look fresh while tracking down hidden mixtapes to unlock new songs or have a solo session with low-fi bird-hop beats in the background".
The big Hearth & Home update for the co-op survival game Valheim is out now and it's a big one. Touching on many aspects of the game to make it feel quite different overall.
Valheim is still mostly the same game but there's so many tweaks that you're going to need a fresh world to experience it all. Thankfully characters can move between worlds so it's not a big issue. However, once you use a character on a new world or play a new world you can't play it with an older version.
How does Boiling Steam work behind the scenes? What’s Gitea? There is not much point in talking about the CMS (Content Management System) we use (WordPress), because that would be a rather boring topic in itself… Rather, how does the small team behind our publication actually organize itself? And what tools do we use and how does Gitea fit into it?
[...]
Doing Peer Review also works well because we all have different backgrounds, tastes and experiences. If we were all from the same mold, it would not be nearly as helpful, nor let us reach beyond an audience we know individually.
Peer Review should not be considered a silver bullet. It will not magically make all errors disappear or render every article perfect. But the more we have feedback, the more we can fix our individual blind spots, so the articles you end up reading are much more robust than their very first draft.
There is no set period for Peer Review: it can take a few days to a few weeks, in case the article demands it. I would say that on average it takes 4-5 days between several rows of feedbacks and a final version. It’s definitely taking more time to follow such a process rather than just writing and pushing articles as soon as we have a draft ready.
How do we deal with the fact that articles may take longer to finalize because of them? Well, we ensure we have a constant stream of new potential articles that we are working on: as long as we work on parallel on several of them, we will be able to release a few articles every week, statistically.
Welcome to my first post-GSoC blogpost. Google Summer of Code might have ended but I'm continuing my daily work on Thunar and Xfce Terminal (more on that later). This blog-post is accompanied by a video that showcases what is written here.
It was in October of 1996 that the KDE desktop environment was founded and as such with marking twenty-five years since its creation, the forthcoming Plasma 5.23 is being advertised as the "25th Anniversary Edition" for the desktop.
KDE Plasma 5.23 Beta is out today ahead of the planned official release next month. Plasma 5.23 has a lot of work in store including changes like:
- Much improved Wayland support, including better touchpad gestures handling, drag-and-drop between native Wayland and XWayland applications, cursor animation fixes, a new screen rotation animation, and much more.
This is the Beta release of Plasma - 25th Anniversary Edition. To make sure that end-users have the best possible experience with the next version of Plasma, KDE is releasing today this test version of the software. We encourage the more adventurous to test-run it and report problems so that developers may iron out the wrinkles before the final release scheduled for the 12th of October.
Plasma 25th Anniversary Edition is a leap forward in the quest for a more performant and usable desktop. We have improved the speed and stability of Plasma, while including changes that make it easier to use both on desktop and touch-enabled devices.
On the Workstation images, accessibility already was at the same level as a finished system would offer. Workstation media run a full Gnome session, with Orca available. The installer does not have to do anything. However, for the Server images the situation is different. The environment is heavily reduced: no sound, no Gnome, no Orca. That also means, no accessibility. Let’s change that!
The latest Fedora 35 beta nightly builds now have the brltty screen reader on Server images. Thus far, brltty is enabled only for the console, which requires Anaconda to be started in text mode. There is also no means to configure the brltty session, so autodetection must work for your braille terminal device.
There’s something about having a watch that’s special. For me, not only is it a good way to tell the time without looking at my phone, it’s also a way to “accessorize” myself (not into piercings or tattoos, gugh…). I’ve owned watches in the past, but I either lost them or they broke after just a few months of having them (the result of buying cheap watches).
These are just standard watches that I’m talking about; smartwatches have the burden of being tied down to a proprietary app on your smartphone in order to get any good use out of them, and what’s more, not only are they generally more expensive than a “dumb” watch, but they also need to be unstrapped from your wrist every week (or maybe every day, depending on what watch you have) and charged so that it can keep telling you the time.
Something about the PineTime struck me though. Not just it’s inexpensive price point ($27 at the time of writing this); but also the fact that this is the first smartwatch I’ve ever seen that’s not powered by Google, Samsung, Apple, or the likes of some other wallet-draining corporation. It’s powered by the community, through open-source software. I can rely on the fact that, as long as the developers stay active, I can keep getting updates to my watch indefinitely, and not have to buy a “second-generation” watch just because the guys at the big corps say, “Well, this watch is two years old now; we have a better model that increases the screen size by about 10 pixels, increases the battery by about 2%, and the vibration is just a hair stronger. You have to buy the new model now because we’re not supporting the older model anymore.”
None of that BS. The beauty the PineTime also has is that it’s not tied down to one specific type of operating system or firmware. I can use different types of firmware depending on my tastes; by default the PineTime ships with InfiniTime (more on that later), but if I want to change to say, WASP OS, that’s possible. Or any other type of firmware/operating system available.
Been some time since my last update, so I felt it was time to flex my blog writing muscles again and provide some updates of some of the things we are working on in Fedora in preparation for Fedora Workstation 35. This is not meant to be a comprehensive whats new article about Fedora Workstation 35, more of a listing of some of the things we are doing as part of the Red Hat desktop team.
One thing we spent a lot of effort on for a long time now is getting full support for the NVidia binary driver under Wayland. It has been a recurring topic in our bi-weekly calls with the NVidia engineering team ever since we started looking at moving to Wayland. There has been basic binary driver support for some time, meaning you could run a native Wayland session on top of the binary driver, but the critical missing piece was that you could not get support for accelerated graphics when running applications through XWayland, our X.org compatibility layer. Which basically meant that any application requiring 3D support and which wasn’t a native Wayland application yet wouldn’t work. So over the last Months we been having a great collaboration with NVidia around closing this gap, with them working closely with us in fixing issues in their driver while we have been fixing bugs and missing pieces in the rest of the stack. We been reporting and discussing issues back and forth allowing us a very quickly turnaround on issues as we find them which of course all resulted in the NVidia 470.42.01 driver with XWayland support. I am sure we will find new corner cases that needs to be resolved in the coming Months, but I am equally sure we will be able to quickly resolve them due to the close collaboration we have now established with NVidia. And I know some people will wonder why we spent so much time working with NVidia around their binary driver, but the reality is that NVidia is the market leader, especially in the professional Linux workstation space, and there are lot of people who either would end up not using Linux or using Linux with X without it, including a lot of Red Hat customers and Fedora users. And that is what I and my team are here for at the end of the day, to make sure Red Hat customers are able to get their job done using their Linux systems.
Been some time since my last update, so I felt it was time to flex my blog writing muscles again and provide some updates of some of the things we are working on in Fedora in preparation for Fedora Workstation 35. This is not meant to be a comprehensive whats new article about Fedora Workstation 35, more of a listing of some of the things we are doing as part of the Red Hat desktop team.
NVidia support for Wayland One thing we spent a lot of effort on for a long time now is getting full support for the NVidia binary driver under Wayland. It has been a recurring topic in our bi-weekly calls with the NVidia engineering team ever since we started looking at moving to Wayland. There has been basic binary driver support for some time, meaning you could run a native Wayland session on top of the binary driver, but the critical missing piece was that you could not get support for accelerated graphics when running applications through XWayland, our X.org compatibility layer. Which basically meant that any application requiring 3D support and which wasn’t a native Wayland application yet wouldn’t work. So over the last Months we been having a great collaboration with NVidia around closing this gap, with them working closely with us in fixing issues in their driver while we have been fixing bugs and missing pieces in the rest of the stack. We been reporting and discussing issues back and forth allowing us a very quickly turnaround on issues as we find them which of course all resulted in the NVidia 470.42.01 driver with XWayland support. I am sure we will find new corner cases that needs to be resolved in the coming Months, but I am equally sure we will be able to quickly resolve them due to the close collaboration we have now established with NVidia. And I know some people will wonder why we spent so much time working with NVidia around their binary driver, but the reality is that NVidia is the market leader, especially in the professional Linux workstation space, and there are lot of people who either would end up not using Linux or using Linux with X without it, including a lot of Red Hat customers and Fedora users. And that is what I and my team are here for at the end of the day, to make sure Red Hat customers are able to get their job done using their Linux systems.
Lightweight kiosk mode One of the wonderful things about open source is the constant flow of code and innovation between all the different parts of the ecosystem. For instance one thing we on the RHEL side have often been asked about over the last few years is a lightweight and simple to use solution for people wanting to run single application setups, like information boards, ATM machines, cash registers, information kiosks and so on. For many use cases people felt that running a full GNOME 3 desktop underneath their application was either to resource hungry and or created a risk that people accidentally end up in the desktop session. At the same time from our viewpoint as a development team we didn’t want a completely separate stack for this use case as that would just increase our maintenance burden as we would end up having to do a lot of things twice. So to solve this problem Ray Strode spent some time writing what we call GNOME Kiosk mode which makes setting up a simple session running single application easy and without running things like the GNOME shell, tracker, evolution etc. This gives you a window manager with full support for the latest technologies such as compositing, libinput and Wayland, but coming in at about 18MB, which is about 71MB less than a minimal GNOME 3 desktop session. You can read more about the new Kiosk mode and how to use it in this great blog post from our savvy Edge Computing Product Manager Ben Breard. The kiosk mode session described in Ben’s article about RHEL will be available with Fedora Workstation 35.
Applications have increasingly relied on event-driven architectures (EDAs) in recent years, especially with the advent of serverless and microservices. EDAs decouple an event from the subsequent actions that may follow, as opposed to traditional linear architectures, where an event might be processed in that same code. This decoupling makes EDA processes able to be independently scaled and, while EDA does not strictly require microservices or serverless, the respective loose coupling and the on-demand nature is a perfect fit.
In the cloud native world, the focus might often be on the serverless side of things, with Knative or Lambda taking the spotlight, but, as the name might imply, event-driven architecture is nothing without events. Apache Camel K takes Apache Camel, the fundamental piece of enterprise integration software that first came around as a sort of codification of the 2003 book Enterprise Integration Patterns, and brings it to Kubernetes, providing EDA with a multitude of event sources, explained Keith Babo, Director of Product Management at Red Hat.
Watch Colin and his trusty tech guru Sean discuss how the Red Hat€® Ansible€® Automation Platform can help improve your business processes and scale for the future.
Our primary motivation for the Shenandoah OpenJDK garbage collection (GC) project is to reduce garbage collection pause times. In JDK 12, we released the original Shenandoah garbage collector, which implements concurrent heap evacuation, which solved the major problem of cleaning (potentially large) heaps without stopping the application. This version was eventually backported to JDK 11. In JDK 14, we implemented concurrent class unloading, and in JDK 16, we added concurrent reference processing, both of which further reduced pause times in those garbage collection operations. The remaining garbage collection operation under pause was thread-stack processing, which we've solved in JDK 17.
This article introduces the new concurrent thread-stack processing in Shenandoah GC. Processing thread stacks concurrently gives us reliable sub-millisecond pauses in JDK 17.
This post explores implementing DevSecOps principles to improve Kubernetes security analysis and remediation across the full development life cycle.
At the Enterprisers Project, we have a clear mission: Help CIOs and IT leaders solve problems. That means not only the technology challenges but also the leadership and career varieties. Our IT leadership community succeeds largely because of all your generosity – in sharing real-world lessons learned with your peers. And what unparalleled lessons they were in 2021.
As expected, the new background doesn’t deviate too far from the traditional template and continues the trend of putting a large animal mascot face at the center of a purple and orange gradient...
You may notice that the mascot artwork (of the Indri itself) is less stylised than in previous releases.
We’ve had oodles of origami-inspired icons (Yakkety Yak, Zesty Zapus); ample angular and/or geometric motifs (Groovy Gorilla, Disco Dingo); and a clutch of companions composed entirely of intersecting concentric rings (Bionic Beaver, Cosmic Cuttlefish, Eoan Ermine, Hirsute Hippo).
A brand-new Linux Mint website has gone live.
Mint devs said that a revamped homepage was in the work, even inviting the community to get involved in shaping the form and function of it. All of that hardwork has paid off as the new Linux Mint website is online.
And it’s looking great...
Ubuntu plans to make the Firefox Snap the default version for new installations of Ubuntu 21.10.
A feature freeze exception (FFE) filed by Canonical’s Olivier Tilloy will replace the Firefox .deb package in the Ubuntu ‘seed’ with the Snap version. He writes: “Per Canonical’s distribution agreement with Mozilla, we’re making the snap the default installation of firefox on desktop ISOs starting with Ubuntu 21.10.”
Firefox is currently distributed via the Ubuntu repos as a deb package. If this feature freeze request is granted users who install Ubuntu 21.10 next month will find the official Snap version of the vaunted web browser there, in its place.
Snaps are used on desktop machines, servers and IoT devices. However, it’s the first group that draws the most attention and scrutiny. Due to the graphic nature of desktop applications, users are often more attuned to potential problems and issues that may arise in the desktop space than with command-line tools or software running in the background.
Application startup time is one of the common topics of discussion in the Snapcraft forums, as well as the wider Web. The standalone, confined nature of snaps means that their startup procedure differs from the classic Linux programs (like those installed via Deb or RPM files). Often, this can translate into longer startup times, which are perceived negatively. Over the years, we have talked about the various mechanisms and methods introduced into the snaps ecosystem, designed to provide performance benefits: font cache improvements, compression algorithm change, and others. Now, we want to give you a glimpse of a Skunk Works* operation inside Canonical, with focus on snaps and startup performance.
Home Assistant is free and open source home automation software that allows you to control and interact with smart home gadgets. You can install the software on a single-board computer or in a virtual machine on a Windows, Mac, or Linux PC.
But soon there may be another option: the Home Assistant team is running a crowdfunding campaign for a purpose-built, customizable smart home hub called Home Assistant Amber. It’s up for pre-order through Crowd Supply and scheduled to ship at the end of June, 2022.
The summer is turning into autumn and it’s again time for a new Sailfish release – the third one this year, having the version number 4.2.0 and bearing the name Verla. The name follows our scheme of Unesco world heritage sites in Finland and Verla is a factory museum and its surrounding area, including an old groundwood mill founded at the end of the 19th century, a part of the history of the paper industry in Finland.
As usual, the changes go all over, some easier to notice and some deeper in the software stack. Let’s go now through some of the main items. More details can be found in the release notes.
Canonical (the company behind Ubuntu) made an important announcement this week. Said announcement was that its managed services had achieved MSP Cloud Verify Certification (MSPCV). According to the company, "The certification further strengthens Canonical's industry-leading open source offering, reassuring customers in all industries that they can securely consume open source in a regulated fashion that complies with all the industry standards and best practices."
Canonical also mentioned in its PR material that 85% of enterprise businesses have an open source mandate to increase agility and reduce costs.
At the same time, Canonical announced the availability of Ubuntu Livepatch on-prem, which is an enhancement to the Ubuntu Livepatch service and provides the basis for an efficient, but fine-tuned continuous vulnerability management on private, hybrid or public clouds.
This post is about how I became a committer and a Project Management Committee (PMC) member of Apache Airflow, and provides guidance to those new to programming, are new to contributing to open-source projects, and want to become committers and PMC members in their respective Apache projects.
About a year and a half after changing my career from electrical engineering to software development, I became a committer and a Project Management Committee member of Apache Airflow. Becoming a committer and a PMC member is a reward and a kind of validation that you are on the right part of your journey.
On February 16, 2021, I accepted an invitation to become a committer in Apache Airflow. It came as a surprise, as I was not expecting it. Six months down the line, I received another surprise invitation to become a PMC member in Apache Airflow.
These are impressive feats for me because before contributing to Apache Airflow, I didn't have experience working with other programmers. I was making websites and taught a few friends of mine how to make their own. I didn't have a mentor, and no one has ever seen my code to advise whether to continue on my journey or drop the idea of becoming a programmer.
While I desired to work with experienced programmers to improve my skills, I feared people seeing my code would talk me down. I almost gave up on my journey only to come across an Outreachy post on Twitter looking for interns for open source projects. Outreachy is a tech diversity program that provides three months of paid, remote internships to people underrepresented in tech.
If recent surveys and polls ring true, over 40% of the global workforce is considering leaving their employer this year. Despite COVID-19 causing initial turnover due to the related economic downturn, the current phenomenon coined “The Great Resignation” is attributed to the many job seekers choosing to leave their current employment voluntarily. Mass vaccinations and mask mandates have allowed offices to re-open just as job seekers are reassessing work-life balance, making bold moves to take control of where they choose to live and work.
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As the Great Resignation continues, it is important to keep in mind that getting a new job is just the start of the journey. There are important steps that you can do, and Firefox and Pocket can help, to make sure that you feel ready for your next career adventure.
Mozilla announced that it’s adding recommendations to the URL bar in Firefox through a new feature called Firefox Suggest.
Firefox Suggest is a new custom search and sponsored suggestions feature of Mozilla’s Firefox web browser. The last month Mozilla is quietly testing Firefox Suggest on a limited number of users in the US. Now Mozilla is rolling out a Firefox Suggest feature to all.
The pgexporter community is happy to announce the initial release version 0.1.0.
Released less than a month ago, the LibreOffice 7.2 office suite has been already adopted by hundreds of thousands of computer users as it’s another great release of the popular, cross-platform and free office suite that continues to improve the interoperability with the MS Office document formats.
Now, LibreOffice 7.2.1 is here as the first maintenance update to the LibreOffice 7.2 series, fixing as many as 87 bugs across all core components. Detailed about these bug fixes are provided in the changelogs from the RC1 and RC2 development milestones.
LibreOffice 7.2.1 Community, the first minor release of the LibreOffice 7.2 family targeted at technology enthusiasts and power users, is available for download from https://www.libreoffice.org/download/. This version includes 87 bug fixes and improvements to document compatibility.
For enterprise-class deployments, TDF strongly recommends the LibreOffice Enterprise family of applications from ecosystem partners, with long-term support options, professional assistance, custom features and Service Level Agreements: https://www.libreoffice.org/download/libreoffice-in-business/.
An interactive chat widget embedded in a website or a web app provides a direct communication live channel between the customer (visitor/ user) and the service provider.
Chat widgets are reliable and easy support channels and ticket sources for many enterprise ticketing and support systems.
Some CRM solutions have integrated LiveChat support systems and support ticket management solution. We covered 23 open-source CRM solutions here, we recommend checking them out.
While many embedded chat widgets come as SaaS, our topic of the day LiveHelperChat is free and open-source.
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LiveHelperChat is generously released under Apache-2.0 License (Open-source).
GStreamer is a powerful multimedia framework with over 30 libraries and more than 1600 elements in 230 plugins providing a wide variety of functionality. This makes it possible to build a huge variety of applications, however it also makes it tricky to ship in a constrained device. Luckily, most applications only use a subset of this functionality, and up until now there wasn't an easy way to generate a build with just enough GStreamer for a specific application.
Thanks to a partnership with Huawei, you can now use gst-build to generate a minimal GStreamer build, tailored to a specific application, or set of applications. In this blog post, we'll look at the major changes that have been introduced in GStreamer to make this possible, and provide a small example of what can be achieved with minimal, custom builds.
I also taught myself coding. Well, I learned the basics of Java programming in school, but I kept on learning beyond that. My first projects were the typical mess that you’d expect from a beginner which has no idea what they are doing. Later I studied computer science and now I’m just a few credit points away from getting my masters degree. Yet, the university is not the place where you learn to code. They do teach you the basics of how a computer works, what a compiler is and even the theory behind creating your own compilers, but they hardly teach you how to write *good* code.
Hello! I was talking to a Python programmer friend yesterday about debugging, and I mentioned that I really like debugging using a REPL. He said he’d never tried it and that it sounded fun, so I thought I’d write a quick post about it.
This debugging method doesn’t work in a lot of languages, but it does work in Python and Ruby and kiiiiiind of in C (via gdb).
NumPy, or Numerical Python, is a library that makes it easy to do statistical and set operations on linear series and matrices in Python. It is orders of magnitude faster than Python lists, which I covered in my notes on Python Data Types. NumPy is used quite frequently in data analysis and scientific calculations.
I'm going to go over installing NumPy, and then creating, reading, and sorting NumPy arrays. NumPy arrays are also called ndarrays, short for n-dimensional arrays.
Ruby, unlike Python, makes lots of things implicit, and there's a special kind of if expression that demonstrates this well. It's often referred to as an "inline-if" or "conditional modifier", and this special syntax is able to return one value when a condition is true, but another value (nil, specifically) when a condition is false.
Oracle this week made Oracle JDK "available for free," for personal, commercial and production use, including quarterly security updates, for a limited time.
"Free" in this context means the software is now licensed under the Oracle No-Fee Terms and Conditions (NFTC) license, having been previously under the Oracle Technology Network (OTN) License Agreement for Oracle Java SE.
But "free" does not mean developers may do as they please. Oracle's NFTC forbids redistribution of its Java software for a fee.
"Free" also does not mean the NFTC license conforms with the Free Software Definition or the Open Source Definition, both of which require allowing fee-based distribution.
"Even though it is 'free to use' – although not really totally free to use, since commercial use isn't free to use – that is extremely different from Free Software and Open Source," said Jim Jagielski, an open source veteran who helped co-found the Apache Software Foundation and now oversees open source at Salesforce.
My Hackaday articles are either cranked out on an Asus Chromebook or a 2017-vintage Dell Intel i7 laptop. The Asus isn’t up to much in the heat stakes because it’s designed as a low-power machine with a frugal battery life, but the Dell by comparison is capable of spinning up its fan at the slightest notice. Aside from its four processor cores it has a spinning-rust disk drive that can get nice and toasty, a DVD drive that must be good for a bit of heat, and a nice big LCD that sadly I wasn’t using for heat-making because I needed to sleep. So with Folding@home I was not really using the laptop’s full potential because I was only lighting up the CPU. At idle it used 10W, which Folding@home could push up to 31W. Could I find an algorithm or a piece of software that might push it closer to the limit? Perhaps I could mine a cryptocurrency, maybe farm Chia to warm up that disk drive instead of Folding@home, but it’s worth pointing out that a 2017 Dell with an Intel chipset isn’t going to make me a millionaire.
It is with sadness that we note the passing of the British writer, engineer, home computer pioneer, and entrepreneur, Sir Clive Sinclair, who died this morning at the age of 81 after a long illness.
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Through the 1980s the computer business foundered and was sold to rival Alan Sugar’s Amstrad, though the Sinclair inventing streak remained undimmed. His C5 electric vehicle was a commercial failure, but it led to his producing a range of electric bicycle add-on products into the ’90s that forestalled today’s electric bike boom by several decades. He wasn’t quite finished with computers though, as his Cambridge Z88 of 1987 was an LCD portable that ran from AA batteries and provided useful on-the-road office facilities.
Aside from an array of always interesting but sometimes under-engineered technology products, Sir Clive’s true legacy lies in the generations who benefited from his work. Whether he introduced them to electronics in the 1960s through his writing, or introduced them to computing in the 1980s though the magic of Sinclair Basic, he delivered the impossible straight from science fiction to an affordable Christmas present. There is a whole cohort of engineers and software developers in the UK and other countries whose first experience of a computer had a Sinclair logo and who learned about memory mapping the ZX way. For us Sir Clive’s companies and products provided a career and a lifelong interest, and there will be few other individuals with such a lasting effect on us. Clive Sinclair, thank you!
The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, along with co-host Fintech Open Source Foundation (FINOS), a nonprofit whose mission is to accelerate adoption of open source software, standards and best practices in financial services, today announced keynote speakers for Open Source Strategy Forum London (OSSF). The event takes place October 5, preceded by a FINOS Member event on October 4, in London, England. The schedule can be viewed here and the keynote speakers can be viewed here.
Security updates have been issued by Debian (sssd), Fedora (libtpms and vim), openSUSE (kernel and php7-pear), Oracle (kernel), Slackware (curl), and Ubuntu (libgcrypt20 and squashfs-tools).
A security flaw in Travis CI potentially exposed the secrets of thousands of open source projects that rely on the hosted continuous integration service. Travis CI is a software-testing solution used by over 900,000 open source projects and 600,000 users. A vulnerability in the tool made it possible for secure environment variables—signing keys, access credentials, and API tokens of all public open source projects—to be exfiltrated.
Any project storing secrets in this service would be well advised to replace them.
OpenSSL 3 has entered Alpine, and we have been switching software to use it over the past week. While OpenSSL 1.1 is not going anywhere any time soon, it will eventually leave the distribution, once it no longer has any dependents. I mostly bring this up because it highlights a few examples of maintainers not thinking about the big picture, let me explain.
First, the good news: in distribution-wide rebuilds, we already know that the overwhelming majority of packages in Alpine build just fine with OpenSSL 3, when individually built against it. Roughly 85% of main builds just fine with OpenSSL 3, and 89% of community builds with it. The rebuild effort is off to a good start.
Major upgrades to OpenSSL are not without their fallout, however. In many cases, we cannot upgrade packages to use OpenSSL 3 because they have dependencies which themselves cannot yet be built with OpenSSL 3. So, that 15% of main ultimately translates to 30-40% of main once you take into account dependencies like curl, which builds just fine with OpenSSL 3, but has hundreds of dependents, some of which don’t.
A major example of this is mariadb. It has been known that OpenSSL 3 was on the horizon for over 4 years now, and that the OpenSSL 3 release would remove support for the classical OpenSSL programming approach of touching random internals. However, they are just now beginning to update their OpenSSL support to use the modern APIs. Because of this, we wound up having to downgrade dozens of packages which would otherwise have supported OpenSSL 3 just fine, because the maintainers of those packages did their part and followed the OpenSSL deprecation warnings as they showed up in OpenSSL releases. MariaDB is a highly profitable company, who do business with the overwhelming majority of the Fortune 500 companies. But yet, when OpenSSL 3 releases started to be cut, they weren’t ready, and despite having years of warning they’re still not, which accordingly limits what packages can get the OpenSSL 3 upgrade as a result.
By popular demand from our staff and community members, this edition of cybersec charcha will explore the basic digital security hygiene practices everyone should follow and how they protect your information from falling into the wrong hands.
As attacks like Pegasus gain more limelight and become part of public knowledge, many of us feel that there is nothing we can do to protect ourselves. And currently, this stands true for sophisticated attacks like Pegasus. However, it’s important to remain cognizant that every time someone’s data is compromised, it’s not because they were targeted with a military grade spyware. It’s crucial for us to be aware of our personal threat levels. This threat level can be determined through a process called Threat Modelling.
Microsoft has released an update to address a remote code execution vulnerability in Azure Linux Open Management Infrastructure (OMI). An attacker could use this vulnerability to take control of an affected system.
Drupal has released security updates to address multiple vulnerabilities affecting Drupal 8.9, 9.1, and 9.2. An attacker could exploit some of these vulnerabilities to take control of an affected system.
Ron Deibert joined Democracy Now to discuss how Citizen Lab research of a zero-click zero-day exploit—used by NSO Group—led Apple to issue a patch to over 1.65 billion products.
The Australian Cyber Security Centre (ACSC) has released its annual report on key cyber security threats and trends for the 2020–21 financial year.
The report lists the exploitation of the pandemic environment, the disruption of essential services and critical infrastructure, ransomware, the rapid exploitation of security vulnerabilities, and the compromise of business email as last year’s most significant threats.
Last week, Renae Green was glancing over the latest version of Jamaica’s draft digital ID bill when she came across a section of text that made her uneasy.
Green, the executive director of the trans rights nonprofit TransWave Jamaica, had been following the twists and turns of a years-long political effort to roll out a digital ID system that would provide Jamaicans with a national identity card while collecting their personal information and biometric data. The latest attempt would require any Jamaican who wants to apply for an ID to give authorities documentation showing their sex assigned at birth, which would be displayed on the back of the card.
Green fears that this requirement could create considerable risks by “outing” trans Jamaicans who don’t identify with their sex assigned at birth, exposing them to possible discrimination and violence while they use the card in their daily lives.
A unit in Afghanistan's central bank leading a 15-year effort to counter illicit funding flows has halted operations, four staff members said, threatening to hasten the country's slide out of the global financial system.
Since 2006, the Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Center of Afghanistan (FinTRACA) has gathered intelligence on thousands of suspicious transactions and helped convict smugglers and terrorist financiers, according to its website.
You’ve no doubt noticed by now that while some links are gold and/or bold, most links out there are blue, especially on web pages of yore. But why? the TL;DR answer is that the Mosaic browser, released in early 1993 used blue links, and since the browser was widely distributed, blue just became the norm. Okay, fine. But why did they choose blue? That’s a question that requires a deep dive into technology through the ages as the Web and personal computing developed in tandem.
Not only is this creepy, it also means that if the manufacturer were to shut down the server, the app would stop working entirely.
