Recently more and more businesses are starting to use Linux operating systems. Its users boast that this system is exceptional for security and means that Linux websites are less likely to be affected by malware, viruses, or from being hacked. However, some Linux users state having problems with the security of this operating system which poses a contradiction. Let’s be honest though, we should not blame Linux for that, but its users instead. Here are the most common mistakes they make, which can lead to security problems...
Back at the beginning of 2020, it was predicted that retirements would increase during this decade. In 2021, the prediction was that retirements would increase over the next couple of years. It is happening and LWN is no exception. I am retiring at the end of this year after more than 20 years with LWN. So who am I and how did I get here? To some, I'm a name at the bottom of some LWN page. To a few, I'm the one that reminds them when their LWN group subscription is about to expire. You might have even met me at a conference. Not that I have been to very many. Mostly I tend to be quietly in the background watching the LWN mailbox, looking for brief items and quotes of the week (sorry I haven't found much lately), proofreading articles, managing subscriptions, and more. But I'm older than most of you and this is my last LWN weekly edition. Getting here is a bit of story.
It may have seemed questionable at times, but we have indeed survived yet another year — LWN's 22nd year of publication. That can only mean one thing: it is time to take a look back at our ill-advised attempt to make predictions in January and see how it all worked out. Shockingly, some of those predictions were at least partially on the mark. Others were ... not quite so good.
The release of the Apache HTTP server 2.4.52 has been published , which contains 25 changes and fixes 2 vulnerabilities...
In the December 2021 survey we received responses from 1,168,864,866 sites across 268,328,184 unique domains and 11,669,818 web-facing computers. This represents a loss of 6.53 million sites, but a gain of 1.30 million domains and 144,000 computers.
nginx lost a significant number of sites (-23.88 million) and domains (-8.54 million) this month, though it continues to hold the highest market share in both categories with 32.9% of sites and 26.7% of domains. nginx’s domain market share lead over Apache dropped significantly, falling from a 5.6 percentage point lead to a 2.6 percentage point lead. nginx also gained 81,100 web-facing computers this month, giving it 37.5% of market share in this category.
Apache also lost sites (-3.09 million) and domains (-446,000) this month, though it gained 5,700 web-facing computers. Apache continues to hold second place across all three key metrics.
The largest increase in both domains and hostnames was seen for “awselb”, used by Amazon’s Elastic Load Balancing service, and accounts for the majority of the loss experienced by nginx. The change was as a result of GoDaddy’s URL redirector service, which allows domains registered with GoDaddy to be pointed at arbitrary URLs, being moved from their own hosting facilities to Amazon’s ELB service.
Many other web servers also saw reasonable growth in the number of sites this month, with OpenResty and Microsoft gaining 2.42 million and 2.15 million respectively, followed by LiteSpeed and Cloudflare with 1.76 million and 1.28 million. Fewer servers gained domains this month, though OpenResty gained a respectable 850,500 (+2.19%).
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Microsoft’s market share dropped, as it lost 4,119 sites this month taking it to 6.15% of the total and down from 6.89% at the start of the year.
In this video, we talk about what #OpenSource is and how contributing can help you.
So my dilemma was that I have triple monitors, and all of the commercial mounting solutions involve either (a) clamping to the back of the desk , or (b) drilling into the desk. And I couldn't do either one of those to the desk in my office.
I'm announcing the release of the 5.15.11 kernel.
All users of the 5.15 kernel series must upgrade.
The updated 5.15.y git tree can be found at: git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git linux-5.15.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
White noise is a combined sound of different frequencies. The noise created as a result provides a calming effect. Examples of white noise include water running down a stream, birds twittering in the morning, or raindrops falling on leaves.
These frequencies help mask background noise by engaging your ears with positive sounds. All these white noises will impart a soothing feel on you.
White noise apps do exactly that and let you relax or focus by minimizing the disturbance from background noises. These apps can even help you go to sleep.
So, let’s look at six white noise apps for Linux that you can download and enjoy for free.
Anyone who wants to transfer large quantities of files, letters and invoices from paper form to a more contemporary digital archive needs a feeder scanner that can automatically digitize several individual sheets. A flatbed scanner would be much too cumbersome for that, especially with documents that are printed on both sides.
Version 3.35.1 of syslog-ng introduced an MQTT source. Just for some fun in the last syslog-ng blog post of the year, I created an endless loop using syslog-ng and the Mosquitto MQTT broker. Of course, it does not have much practical value other than possibly a bit of stress testing, but hopefully provides a fun introduction to MQTT-related technologies in syslog-ng.
The Secure Shell protocol is a common way to connect with a remote machine via client/server applications. It makes use of a toolset such as ssh, scp, and sftp, among many others, to ensure a secure authentication process and encrypted communication that follows. Due to this, these tools replace other older remote command execution toolsets such as telnet, rcp, and rlogin.
In this guide you will learn how to install and enable OpenSSH server/client services in your machine. It also covers all the necessary commands (SSH tools) to access and remotely manage systems and transfer files in between.
Wine is a compatibility layer capable of running Windows applications on several POSIX-compliant operating systems i.e Linux, macOS, and BSD. Instead of simulating internal Windows logic like a virtual machine or emulator, Wine translates Windows API calls into POSIX calls instantly eliminating the performance and memory penalties of other methods and allowing you to integrate Windows applications in your desktop.
There are a number of dangerous commands that can be executed to crash a Linux system. You may find a nefarious user executing these commands on a system you manage, or someone may send you a seemingly harmless command, hoping that you will run it and crash your computer.
It is important for system administrators to be aware of these commands, and run them on their own systems to ensure that they have taken the proper measures to prevent these attacks. Then again, maybe you are just a curious user and you want to crash your virtual machine for fun. That is fine, too.
In this tutorial, we will talk about Free Let’s Encrypt SSL certificate alternatives.
free lets encrypt ssl certificate alternatives We are going to show you how to install a Free Let’s Encrypt SSL certificate and its alternatives such as BuyPass and ZeroSSL certificates. The SSL certificate is a digital certificate, that enables the encrypted collection to identify the identity of the website and improves its security.
The SSL certificate is required also to verify ownership of the website, prevent attackers from creating fake versions of the website, and keep user data secure. Let’s get started!
Have you ever heard about AutoHotKey or tried to set up custom keyboard shortcuts to start applications or open files and folders in Windows?
Linux has its own custom keyboard shortcut option to attach custom shortcuts to Program, File, and Folder. For windows, the story is a little bit different, here you don’t have any built-in option instead have to take the help of applications like AutoHotKey.
In the future, I expect Microsoft will introduce this as a built-in feature in their operating system or at least integrate it with its powerful open-source tool PowerToys.
In this guide, we will explore setting up Opencart in a OpenSUSE Leap Server with Apache serving it and Mariadb 10 acting as the database.
Opencart is an open-source eCommerce platform. Everything you need to create, scale and run your business”. It is an Open Source online store management system. It is PHP-based, using a MySQL database and HTML components.
Apache is a popular web web server software that is often used to serve php content. Mysql is also a popular relational management system used by popular websites.
In this guide we will install and connfigure Webmin on a Rocky Linux 8 server. This guide will also work for other RHEL 8 based servers like Oracle Linux and Centos 8.
Webmin is a web-based system configuration tool for Unix-like systems, although recent versions can also be installed and run on Microsoft Windows. It s a free and open-source control panel for administering Unix/Linux servers.
Webmin provides users with a graphical web-based user interface to configure common system tasks and settings. If you don’t like the idea of using the command line to manage your server, then Webmin is a good graphical alternative to you. The following is a list of functionalities provided by Webmin.
In this guide we are going to Install and set up Apache virtual host to serve PHP content on an OpenSUSE Leap 15.4 system.
The Apache HTTP Server(Apache), is one of the most popular free and open-source cross-platform web server software, released under the terms of Apache License 2.0. Apache is popular as part of the LAMP setup, being the A in the Acronym. The apache server functionality can be extended with the many available modules.
PHP is a general-purpose scripting language geared towards web development. It is one of the popular programming languages for the web. Popular tools such as WordPress are coded using php. Big companies like Facebook also uses php heavily.
In this guide we are going to install and set up PHP and Nginx in Rocky Linux/Alma Linux 8. We will also set up a virtual host to serve a simple php info page.
PHP is a general-purpose scripting language geared towards web development. It is one of the popular programming languages for the web. Popular tools such as WordPress are coded using php. Big companies like Facebook also uses php heavily.
Nginx is a web server that can also be used as a reverse proxy, load balancer, mail proxy and HTTP cache. It started out as a web server designed for maximum performance and stability. Nginx has grown in popularity since its release due to its light-weight resource utilization and its ability to scale easily on minimal hardware. Nginx excels at serving static content quickly and is designed to pass dynamic requests off to other software that is better suited for those purposes.
In this video, I am going to show how to install Zorin OS 16 Lite.
Just like with ZIP, RAR is another format to compress and create archive files on a PC or laptop. This process compresses the data and reduces storage space. RAR (.rar) is one of the common formats of compressing files, hence if you are on Debian 11 or 10 and want to use unrar to extract some RAR format archive file downloaded from the web then here are the steps to follow.
Unrar is the tool available in the Debian Base repository for the extraction of compressed archive (.rar) files. Well, we need to install it manually because Unrar is not pre-installed on the Linux systems.
Here we learn not only the method to install Unrar on Debian 11 or 10 but also how to use its command line to extract or uncompress a RAR archive file.
Sketchup 3D is one of the most popular 3D design and modeling software. It is an intuitive 3D modeling application that is suitable for creating designs and presentations in the fields such as construction, architecture, interior design, video game design, industrial design, and many more.
You can quickly implement many design models such as creating blueprints for buildings and machine parts, site surveying, landscape architecture, and animation concepts. The software is available for free as SketchUp Free with limited features or as premium software (SketchUp Pro), which comes with complete toolsets.
The article is a step-by-step guide on installing Sketchup 3D on Ubuntu using Wine.
In the seven years since Kubernetes was released, there have been various efforts to simplify the process of consuming and binding to services from Kubernetes clusters. While discovering a service isn't much of an issue if you employ a well-known set of conventions, getting the credentials and other details required to access that service is sometimes trickier.
The Kubernetes Service Catalog was an attempt to simplify provisioning and binding to services, but it seems to have lost momentum. The lack of uniformity between providers, differences in how each service communicates binding information, and the fact that developers tend to favor operators for provisioning services all made the Service Catalog hard to use in practice.
The Service Binding Operator for Kubernetes and Red Hat OpenShift is a more recent initiative. It stays out of the way of service provisioning, leaving that to operators. Instead, it focuses on how to best communicate binding information to the application. An interesting part of the specification is the workload projection, which defines a directory structure that will be mounted to the application container when binding occurs in order to pass all the required binding information: type, URI, and credentials
Other parts of the specification are related to the ServiceBinding resource, which controls which services are bound to which application, and how.
This guide will show you how to install the KDE Plasma desktop environment on Ubuntu Linux. This process will work if you are switching from GNOME to KDE, or just need to install KDE Plasma on an Ubuntu server that doesn’t currently have a GUI.
mTLS or mutual TLS is a way of doing mutual authentication. When we talk about TLS in general, we only about TLS for the servers/services. There the clients can verify that they are connected to the right server. But, the server does not know much about the clients themselves. This can be done via mTLS, say for services talking to each other. To know more please read the Cloudflare writeup on mTLS.
This week I created an Introduction to Koji video. Koji is the build system we use for the Fedora Project and Red Hat products.
Have you tried many desktop environments but nothing suits your taste? Or maybe you like some components of a desktop environment and don’t like the others. Perhaps it's time to consider building your own desktop environment...
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Jenkins on Fedora 35. For those of you who didn’t know, Jenkins is a popular and open source automation server written in Java, which helps automate the non-human part of the whole software development process. Jenkins allows executing a predefined list of steps, for example: to compile Golang source code to build a binary file.
This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you through the step-by-step installation of the Jenkins open source automation server on a Fedora 35.
R is an open-source programming language and free software environment for statistical computing and graphical representation created and supported by the R Core Team and the R Foundation. R’s popularity is widely used amongst statisticians and data miners for statistical and data analysis software developers.
In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install R on Debian 11 Bullseye.
Some times, I don't think straight and accidentally "SHIFT+DELETE" my data. Worse, I don't even backup the data before deleting them. If you're anything like me, here is a good news for you. I know an useful commandline utility called "chattr" that is used to prevent files and folders from accidental deletion or modification in Linux.
Chattr, short for Change Attribute, applies/removes certain attributes to a file or folder in your Linux system. So nobody can delete or modify the files and folders either accidentally or intentionally, even as root user. Sounds useful, isn't it? Indeed!
It has been just over a year since we first announced our effort to implement a Wayland driver for Wine. Since then a lot of work has been done to improve the functionality and stability of the driver, and to provide a cleaner and more upstreamable patchset. This work continues as we expand our testing and receive valuable feedback from the community.
To end the year the open source consulting firm Collabora, who often works with Valve, has written up a fresh post with a video to show off their Wayland driver for Wine. Something they announced originally back in 2020, they've really put a lot of work into this one.
Reaching a stage where a huge amount of things now sound like they're working including window handling, OpenGL and Vulkan (with support for WineD3D and DXVK), multiple monitor support, HiDPI scaling and the list goes on. It's coming together nicely. It's not quite ready for upstreaming yet, and they have some issues still to be solved for things like cross-process rendering (Chromium/CEF based applications, like game stores).
In 2022 DirectX 12 support is a top priority. That being said, our CrossOver developers are working through the challenge of developing support for DirectX 12 in two distinct gaming environments. The obstacles in Linux are not the same as the obstacles in Mac. Let's take a look at how CrossOver supports DirectX 12 and what the challenges are.
CrossOver uses VKD3D to run DirectX 12 games. VKD3D is a 3D graphics library built on top of Vulkan. Currently, lots of work is being done to improve VKD3D performance. With the help of the Vulkan descriptor indexing extension, which allows for functionality similar to DirectX 12 descriptor heaps, Vulkan descriptors are written less often and far less GPU memory is used. As a result, VKD3D can support games that use enough descriptors to require resources from Tier 2 and Tier 3 hardware.
While the VKD3D-Proton fork has been very active and running an increasing number of Direct3D 12 Windows games well as part of Valve's Steam Play, CodeWeavers and the upstream Wine community does continue working on VKD3D. CodeWeavers is planning to make big improvements to VKD3D in 2022 to offer better DirectX 12 support with their commercial CrossOver software for Linux and macOS.
CodeWeavers CrossOver is one of the most popular ways to run Windows applications on other operating systems. It combines the excellent work of the open-source Wine project (of which CrossOver’s developers contribute code to) with an easier-to-use interface and front end. CodeWeavers released CrossOver 21 back in August, and now the company has shared details about its work to bring modern game support to Linux and Mac.
Many recent Windows games (and other graphics-heavy applications) rely on DirectX 12, the latest version of Microsoft’s DirectX graphics library, which uses lower-level APIs to achieve faster performance. DirectX is only available on Windows (and Xbox consoles), so the Wine compatibility layer uses the VKD3D graphics library to execute Direct3D calls on top of Vulkan (which is available on Linux, Windows, and other platforms). The Vkd3d library is primarily developed by Valve Software for its Proton compatibility layer, and the rapid progress on VKD3D is the main reason why so many Windows games are now playable on Linux.
A weird love-child mixture of games like Minecraft, Stardew Valley and Terraria we have Necesse that's currently in Early Access and a Linux version is now available. On Monday, December 20 the next major update of the game landed which overhauled and improved many parts of the game and gave us a surprise with support both both Linux and macOS.
Developed by Mads Skovgaard who goes under the alias Fair, Necesse originally started off as a hobby game but eventually progressed into something that Skovgaard was able to work full time on and it is yet another impressive example of what a solo developer / tiny team can do. Looks like it will scratch a good itch for crafting and exploration fans.
Have you ever felt like Linux gaming was too difficult, you don't want to deal with the setup, well lucky for you GameBuntu exists to Linus proof your ubuntu install and make linux gaming a piece of cake
For those wanting to pickup some new games to enjoy around the holidays and/or expand your game collection ahead of the Steam Deck beginning to ship next quarter, Valve's Winter Sale is now underway.
Valve calls this their "biggest sale of the year" with big discounts on a plethora of games -- for the games that aren't native to Linux, many Windows titles will work with ease thanks to Steam Play.
The moment I'm sure plenty of our readers have been waiting for: the Steam Winter Sale 2021 is now live.
Perhaps now is a good time to stock up on some games ready for the Steam Deck? Then again, speaking from experience, my own backlog is somewhat frightening that I can't wait to dive in with on it. Still…certain games are hard to ignore when they have a particularly tasty discount going.
Seems that Blender isn't the only free and open source project pulling in attention from backers, with the Godot Engine team announcing today that Facebook / Meta have given them additional funding for VR / AR (XR) work.
This follows on from the grant the Godot team received around the same time in 2020, that saw developer Bastiaan Olij overhaul many parts of XR support in Godot including a mobile version of the Vulkan renderer, stereoscopic rendering support through Multiview and a rewrite of the core XR system in the upcoming Godot 4. On top of that, work was done to bring full OpenGL-based OpenXR support to Godot 3 and more.
We are delighted to announce that the Godot Engine project is receiving a new grant from Meta's Reality Labs to support our work on the XR capabilities of the engine.
This renews Reality Labs' engagement to support the free and open source Godot game engine, after a first grant in December 2020. This grant will enable us to continue our efforts in providing a high quality, free and open source all-in-one solution for AR and VR applications.
We designed an XR work package for 2022 which is funded thanks to this generous grant. Like all Godot donations and corporate sponsoring, this grant is administered by our legal and fiscal sponsor Software Freedom Conservancy, a not-for-profit charity that promotes software freedom.
We released Godot 3.4.1 just a few days ago with a huge array of bugfixes, but a regression was then found for macOS rendering which could cause flickering.
This new Godot 3.4.2 is a hotfix release to solve this and a few other minor issues that were fixed in the meantime. Godot 3.4.2 is a recommended upgrade for all Godot 3.4 and 3.4.1 users.
For a detailed overview of the changes that 3.4.1 included and which are also part of this new release, please read the 3.4.1 release notes.
Download Godot 3.4.2 now or try the online version of the Godot editor.
I don't actually often play the big AAA games but for Death Stranding, I finally took the plunge and thanks to Steam Play Proton running it on Linux was a fantastic experience overall. Note: spoilers, personal purchase.
With my ancient PlayStation 4 on its last legs, I'm glad I sat on this and waited a little while for any patches and then eventually the Windows release on Steam so it worked out all quite nicely. I'm certainly no stranger to Hideo Kojima, having played through various Metal Gear games and always liked the production value Kojima puts in and Death Stranding delivers constantly. It certainly helps that it has an all-star cast with the likes of Norman Reedus, Mads Mikkelsen, Léa Seydoux, and Lindsay Wagner.
Times are tough for some developers with the latest victim of a poor release being Book of Travels from Might and Delight.
Following on from a successful crowdfunding campaign for their small online RPG, the developer managed to raise around €£207,362. That was back towards the end of 2019 and it saw a few delays before entering Early Access in October 2021. Seems the release did not go as well as they had hoped.
Ready to pick up some more games to stay warm with this Winter? If you enjoy indie games then it may be worth take a look over on itch.io with their Winter Sale. Live now until January 3, 2022.
One of the really interesting things about itch.io is that developers set their own revenue share with the store, it can even be 0% if they really wanted to. There's also the ability to pay more if you really like the game with various funding options. They also have an open source app.
According to the protondb.com service , which collects information on the performance of gaming applications in the Steam catalog on Linux, 80% of the 100 most popular games are currently running on Linux. When looking at the top 1000 games, the support rate is 75% and the Top10 is 40%. In general, out of 21244 tested games, performance was confirmed for 17649 games (83%).
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According to the protondb.com service , which collects information on the performance of gaming applications in the Steam catalog on Linux, 80% of the 100 most popular games are currently running on Linux. When looking at the top 1000 games, the support rate is 75% and the Top10 is 40%. In general, out of 21244 tested games, performance was confirmed ... Read more
So it's that time of the year again and about time for an end-of-year post. Some news in Maps for the upcoming GNOME 42.
Finally, we have added support for running development versions of Maps (such as from the Nightly Flatpak repo) in parallel with the stable ones
The develop one is distinguished by the “cogwheel” background in the headerbar, and also by it's ”bio-hazard” strip icon as seen above.
Dubbed “Qonos” and powered by the latest long-term supported Linux 5.15 LTS kernel series, Manjaro Linux 21.2 is here four months after Manjaro Linux 21.1 “Pahvo” to give you up-to-date live and installable ISO images with all the latest and greatest GNU/Linux technologies and Open Source software.
Manjaro Linux 21.2 “Qonos” ships with the usual editions featuring the Xfce, GNOME, and KDE Plasma desktop environments, which have been updated to Xfce 4.16 (same version as in previous releases since Xfce 4.18 is yet to be released), GNOME 41.2, and KDE Plasma 5.23.4.
Arch-based Manjaro Linux is out with version 21.2 "Qonos" ahead of the holidays in offering some nice incremental updates for this popular enthusiast distribution.
First up, Manjaro 21.2 continues improving its Calamares-based installer. With Manjaro 21.1 back in August there were some Btrfs file-system support improvements and that continued for 21.2. Manjaro 21.2 has an improved default sub-volume layout for better snapshots/rollbacks, swapfile support on Btrfs, and other installation improvements.
Since we released Pahvo Mid-Season this year all our developer teams worked hard to get the next release of Manjaro out there. We call it Qonos.
This release features major improvements to Calamares, including filesystem selection for automatic partitioning and enhanced support for btrfs. For btrfs installations, the default subvolume layout has been improved for easier rollbacks and less wasted space on snapshots. Additionally, swapfiles on btrfs filesystem are now supported.
You can’t prepare for every “black swan” event – consider the current supply chain disruptions impacting the holiday season and creating inflationary pressures. Even planned technology upgrades or simple configuration changes can have catastrophic consequences.
SkyWest recently reported in its quarterly earnings that migration of critical systems to a newly built server in October resulted in a server outage. This IT issue resulted in a cancellation of 1,700 flights, disruption to other major airlines and thousands of passengers, and a potential loss of $15 to $20 million.
By their nature, disasters – especially black swan events bought on by the pandemic – are not easy to predict. But as an IT leader, you can better prepare for them and reduce the business impact by focusing on three key areas: enforcing change management controls, managing risks, and ensuring business continuity governance.
In a different professional life, I was a technical instructor. I noticed that some students excelled at learning through books or lectures, but most people learn by doing. One frustration was limited lab time because of the realities of being out of the office, and another was the amount of content I needed to deliver. I also had to keep up with myriad changes to operating systems and network technologies.
All this is to say that I'm a big believer in the value of hands-on opportunities for IT practitioners, whether they're just breaking into the industry or have decades of experience.
As an editor and author for Enable Sysadmin, I'm regularly exposed to creative ideas in the articles I edit. I recently edited two articles that covered home-lab environments, Build a lab in five minutes with three simple commands by Alex Callejas and Build a lab in 36 seconds with Ansible by Ricardo Girardi. After doing some digging on the Enable Sysadmin site, I discovered other articles on the topic. These articles are great (and discussed in more detail below), and I discovered I could expand on some of the topics they cover. These articles inspired me to write several more pieces on creating and using hands-on learning environments.
To help boost your continuing education, this article pulls together Enable Sysadmin's resources on creating a home lab environment.
We’re all still navigating this hybrid work thing, but one thing that’s for sure is that it’s prompting us to wear more hats than we’ve ever had to. We’ve got people in system administrator and architect roles also juggling their conference call "mute monitor" hats and parenting hats—and doing it well.
The Red Hat Blog is proud to have been a trusted hat rack for many households this year. We provided troubleshooting and security guides when you needed them and also had the opportunity to celebrate big milestones with you. Our readers wanted to know more about a wide range of topics—and we’re proud to have been your resource for everything from hybrid work to hybrid cloud.
In this post, we invite you to take a look back at some of the most visited pages on the Red Hat Blog in 2021 (listed in no particular order).
No matter what hat you’re wearing today, rest assured that Red Hat is still Red Hat. And we’re going to continue bringing you the open source goodness you love while helping you navigate where we go from here—whether that’s from home, office or your local coffee shop.
Red Hat Developer always puts developers at the center of what we do, and we are proud of the content we published this year on application development and support topics. Keep reading for our most popular articles on Java, Quarkus, Apache Kafka, Camel K, and more.
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Java remains one of the most important development platforms for enterprise use. Developers are eager to learn how to use their Java code and skills to build applications in modern distributed environments. So it's no surprise that this year's most popular Java article was the first installment in our series on making Java programs cloud-ready, An incremental approach using Jakarta EE and MicroProfile. Part two of the series, Upgrade the legacy Java application to Jakarta EE, garnered a lot of reader interest as well. For more on this topic, check out Markus Eisele and Natale Vinto's new book Modernizing Enterprise Java.
The recent release of JDK Flight Recorder and JDK Mission Control as open source was widely welcomed in the Java developer community. Our readers were interested in how they could use their VM monitoring and analytics capabilities in their own containerized projects. Andrew Azores delivered an Introduction to Cryostat: JDK Flight Recorder for containers, while Jie Kang discussed JDK Flight Recorder support for GraalVM Native Image.
For the fourteenth year in a row, Red Hatters based in the United States took an active role in selecting a charitable organization to be the beneficiary of our U.S. corporate holiday donation. During the process, more than 140 charities were nominated, and more than 1,100 associates participated in the final vote. This year, we used a cumulative voting approach, which allowed associates to rank their top five organizations from the initial list. The National Park Foundation received the most votes and will receive a $50,000 donation that will contribute to the organization's mission to protect these places we all share.
On top of our donation to the National Park Foundation, we will also be donating an additional $50,000, which will be split between the next four charities based on associate voting. Those charities are Every Mother Counts, The Trevor Project, Code.org and the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation.
Flatpak is a distribution agnostic universal package manager leveraging bubblewrap to separate applications from the system, and OSTree to manage applications. There are multiple Flatpak repositories (remotes in Flatpak terminology), such as Flathub (the de-facto standard), GNOME Nightly, KDE and finally Fedora Flatpaks, Fedora Project’s Flatpak remote.
This article explains the motivation behind Fedora Flatpaks, how to add the remote, how to use it and where to find resources.
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Flatpak is built with the Linux desktop in mind. Application stores such as GNOME Software have the ability to install and remove Flatpak applications after you add a Flatpak remote, making it easy to manage applications.
On GNOME Software, visiting an application’s page and pressing on the Source button at the top right hand side opens the list of available of sources. By default, on Fedora Linux, GNOME Software selects Fedora Linux (RPM). Fedora Linux (Flatpak), provided by Fedora Flatpaks, is available as an available source, but is not used by default. Simply select it, and then press on the “Install” button.
For example, to install Firefox from Fedora Flatpaks, head over to the Firefox page on GNOME Software. Then, press on the Source button at the top right hand side.
Free software can only be a sustainable idea if we are continuously bringing new people into the free software community. For a freer future, we need to guarantee that free software continues to be developed, that interest in it continues to grow, and that activism for its use spreads. Since most people are not taught to be aware of the technological tools that are so deeply integrated into their lives, the idea of software freedom is not one that is typically as valued as it should be, and as it would be if people understood the snowball effect that software freedom can have on our day to day lives. Software is the language of the world we live in, but unlike learning how to read, which is considered a priority in life, it is not something that is taught at a general level. Rather, the understanding of software is reserved for the "highly specialized."
With this campaign, we want to have supportive conversations about the challenges this lack of technical knowledge poses to bringing new people into the fold, and we want to accommodate the fact that most people do not step into full software freedom in the span of a single day. It takes one step at a time. And like every other climb in life, we want to help people to appreciate where they find themselves, as much as their destination.
Released earlier this month was AMD's AOCC 3.2 compiler based on LLVM/Clang/Flang that provides optimized support for AMD Zen processors. I've been running some benchmarks of AOCC 3.2 compared to prior AMD Optimizing C/C++ Compiler releases and this newest release has been helpful in squeezing a bit more out of Zen 3.
Intel has now made their oneAPI Toolkits 2022 release publicly available after announcing it earlier this quarter.
Intel's oneAPI Toolkits offers a wide assortment of open-source software components for maximizing the potential out of Intel hardware from CPUs to GPUs/XPUs. This includes packages from their oneDNN deep learning library to their Data Parallel C++ compiler, optimized Python packages like for TensorFlow and PyTorch, OpenVINO, and a lot more. It's quite an incredible assortment of packages at this point and quite useful to developers.
In a well-designed QML application, the UI is built using re-usable components, while the data and logic live in C++ based components we call controllers here. The QML part of the application uses these components (that themselves may be written in QML or C++) to build up the user interface and connect these components with the controllers. In this setup, the controllers provide the data as well as receive input from the UI. How hard can it be?
GNU poke allows the users to write their own descriptions of the data they want to edit or operate with. These descriptions are written in the Poke programming language, and consist on type definitions, variables, functions, pretty-printers and so on. We call 'pickles' to Poke source files containing definitions of types, variables, functions, etc, that conceptually apply to some definite domain. For example, elf.pk is a pickle that provides facilities to poke ELF object files. Pickles are not necessarily related to file formats: a set of functions to work with bit patterns, for example, could be implemented in a pickle bitpatterns.pk.
When it comes to developing powerful backends for web solutions, it is essential to choose a robust framework. Advancing technology has brought many languages and frameworks into the web application development domain, but Laravel remainsone of the preferred choices for developers. Be it creating a simple one-page website or an entire full-fledged social networking app, Laravel always assists web developers to come up with customized, feature-rich solutions.
We will go through the most common web applications based on Laravel in this article. But, before moving ahead, let’s have a glance at the top benefits of this open-source PHP web framework.
CISA, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the National Security Agency (NSA), and the cybersecurity authorities of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom have released a joint Cybersecurity Advisory in response to multiple vulnerabilities in Apache’s Log4j software library. Malicious cyber actors are actively scanning networks to potentially exploit CVE-2021-44228 (known as “Log4Shell”), CVE-2021-45046, and CVE-2021-45105 in vulnerable systems. According to public reporting, Log4Shell and CVE-2021-45046 are being actively exploited.
This advisory expands on CISA’s previously published guidance, drafted in collaboration with industry members of CISA’s Joint Cyber Defense Collaborative (JCDC), by detailing recommended steps that vendors and organizations with information technology, operational technology/industrial control systems, and cloud assets should take to respond to these vulnerabilities.
A few days ago, a parent proudly posted on social media some photographs (not the ones you see here) of several toys he had happily, proudly 3D-printed at home for his 6-years old son. Discussion ensued.
Background, in case you are wondering: this activity is relatively easy for every parent with a bit of spare skill, money, time and desk space at home. Basically, once you have the 3D printer all you have to do is download into it the design files you available, on Thingiverse and similar portals, for train sets, Duplo Playgrounds and many more toys.
As I said, discussion ensued. A few of its contents may be relevant for every parent pondering the same question, so here they are.
Materials Science is Britannica ” the study of the properties of solid materials and how those properties are determined by a material’s composition and structure.”
A newsletter I just received summarizes what is required for a “True Digital Transformation” of Research and Development (R&D) activities in that crucial branch of science and engineering.
To know more about that specific issue, read the full email, or the actual “Report on Materials Informatics 2022-2032”.
What you need to know here is that one of the ways in which that R&D should change is essential for a positive “digital transformation” of the whole society, not just Materials Science.
The Dreamcast is a bit of an odd beast. Coming on the heels of the unpopular Sega Saturn, the Dreamcast was meant to be a simple console built with off-the-shelf parts. The PlayStation 2 was already tough competition, and ultimately the Dreamcast fell out of the public eye as the Nintendo 64 was released with incredible fanfare. In some sense, it’s a footnote in console history.
But despite not achieving the success that Sega hoped for, the Dreamcast has formed a small cult following, because as we know, nothing builds a cult-like following like an untimely demise. Since its release, it has gained a reputation for being ahead of its time. It was the first console to include a modem for network play and an easy storage solution for transferring game data between consoles via the VMUs that docked in the controllers. It had innovative and classic games such as Crazy Taxi, Jet Set Radio, Phantasy Star Online, and Shenmue. Microsoft even released a version of Windows CE with DirectX allowing developers to port PC games to the console quickly.
We see our fair share of console hacks here on Hackaday, but what is the ultimate legacy of the Dreamcast? How did it come to be? What happened to it, and why did so much of Sega’s hopes ride on it?
If you own a Dell PC, you might want to be a bit more careful with installing the latest system updates. According to multiple reports on social media, there’s a new BIOS version that could end up wrecking Dell Latitude 5320 and 5520 laptops, the Inspiron 5680 desktop, and even the Alienware Aurora R8.
There are three specific BIOS versions that are causing issues. On the Dell Latitude 5320 and 5520, the BIOS number comes in at version 1.14.3. On the Dell Inspiron 5680, it comes in at version 2.8.0, and on the Alienware Aurora R8, it’s version 1.0.18. Based on social media accounts, after installing this BIOS version, users report that these systems are unable to boot into Windows. In some cases, users can’t even access their files and other important content.
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On the Alienware side of things, with the Aurora R8, a user running the Ubuntu operating system on the device reports that after installing problematic BIOS, the system’s hard freezes and crashes. The system also sometimes reboots to an endless automatic repair loop. Using the recovery mode, recovery USB, and Ubuntu recovery stick does not resolve the issue. Though it has not been confirmed, this user specifically believes it could be a motherboard problem, linked to the BIOS update.
Security updates have been issued by CentOS (firefox, ipa, log4j, and samba), Debian (sogo, spip, and xorg-server), Fedora (jansi and log4j), Mageia (apache, apache-mod_security, kernel, kernel-linus, and x11-server), openSUSE (log4j and xorg-x11-server), Oracle (kernel, log4j, and openssl), and SUSE (libqt4 and xorg-x11-server).
Got Linux machines? Running a time-repeated patch script on each one is a dated practice. Centralized patch management across your fleet is the way forward — and it’s achievable, too.
Linux comes with significant benefits as an operating system for organizations large and small. Linux machines are highly configurable and customizable, whether they’re physical or virtualized, server or client, housed on-site or elsewhere, using Ubuntu, Red Hat, or another distro. They also present significant cost savings over other operating systems such as Windows and macOS.
One of the most prevalent discussions on Opensource.com in 2021 was about the security and privacy of your own data. A noticeable theme was that your data is yours and that passwords were key to security. This year's security authors provided helpful tips and open source tools for keeping your data and hardware secure.
The Apache Software Foundation has released Apache HTTP Server 2.4.52. This version addresses vulnerabilities—CVE-2021-44790 and CVE-2021-44224—one of which may allow a remote attacker to take control of an affected system.
However, on December 1, following an investigation in collaboration with Japanese law enforcement authorities, the FBI seized the 3879.16242937 BTC in Ishii’s wallet after obtaining the private key, which made it possible to transfer all the bitcoins to the FBI’s bitcoin wallet.
