I'm a fan of what Microsoft finally brought to the desktop with Windows 11. Our resident Windows expert Zac Bowden gave the OS a positive score in his incredible in-depth review and I agree with the majority of what was written. Where Windows 11 falls flat for me, however, is with the installation process. It's an absolute mess.
I have a few test rigs configured for various PC components we review here at Windows Central and installing fresh copies of Windows for Intel's 12th Gen launch was riddled with issues from the get-go. The installer would either refuse to load or fail to see drives. In fact, one install required a 2.5-inch SATA SSD to be connected to the board in order for Windows 11 to successfully boot from the M.2 NVMe drive.
Interestingly, I never had an issue with the latest security measures that require trusted platform modules (or TPM) since most motherboards and processors released in the past few years support it out of the box. It was more Windows having trouble with SSDs, sometimes even outright refusing to install Windows on specific drives.
For a laugh, I installed Linux Mint on all the machines and didn't see a single problem. Not one. This is a billion-dollar company going up against average Joe and losing in my anecdotal experiences.
But Windows isn't completely out of my life. I still use it regularly to remain in the loop with all the latest news and because we continue to benchmark products using the OS. For my main PC, Windows isn't even installed on a secondary drive anymore.
Mike finds a new normal and doubles down on what works. Chris meanwhile is stranded in the woods and is having a bit of a panic.
Some old friends of JB join Alex to discuss 3D printing.
Intel has published a new patch series for its Linux drivers that promise to improve the performance of its hybrid Alder Lake processors by optimizing usage of (P)erformance and (E)fficiency cores.
When Intel released its 12th Generation Core 'Alder Lake' processors earlier this year, it quickly turned out that the new CPUs perform better under Windows rather than under Linux. Unlike Windows 11, Linux does not have proper support for Intel's Thread Director technology based on the Enhanced Hardware Feedback Interface (HFI), which enables the OS to utilize high-performance Golden Cove and energy-efficient Gracemont cores properly.
At present, the Linux kernel decides when to use P or E cores using the ITMT/Turbo Boost Max 3.0 driver that relies on the information exposed by the firmware, reports Phoronix. Essentially, this means that under Linux, the OS in many cases prefers the fastest cores (i.e., Golden Coves at high clocks) and underutilizes energy-efficient cores.
For those running Linux on Lenovo ThinkPad laptops, the upcoming Linux 5.17 cycle is set to bring a few improvements to the "thinkpad_acpi" driver.
Thanks to developers Ognjen Galic and Thomas Weißschuh, the ThinkPad ACPI driver is adding support for inhibit charge behavior if wanting to temporarily disable charging support for ThinkPads allowing this behavior through the system's embedded controller (EC).
Similarly, there is also now force discharge support if wanting to force the battery to change and again contingent upon EC support from the ThinkPad.
Thanks to Valve engineer Timur Kristóf and other open-source developers involved, Mesa's Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" is ending 2021 on a high note: mesh shaders was just merged!
As noted back in October, RADV has been working on mesh shaders at least in experimental form and making use of NVIDIA's NV_mesh_shader extension.
Mesh shaders provide a compute-like shader stage to replace the conventional vertex/geometry pipeline. This work though is expected to remain "experimental" until there is a proper Vulkan cross-vendor extension around mesh shaders as NV_mesh_shader is known to perform poorly on AMD hardware for which the extension was not designed.
Mesh shaders support requires Radeon RX 6000 "RDNA2" GPUs and newer for support. This experimental mesh shaders support will be part of Mesa 22.0 that will debut as stable by March. This may prove beneficial for VKD3D-Proton in mapping Direct3D 12 mesh shaders atop Vulkan but, again, the performance isn't expected to be optimal.
Intuit Inc. is an American corporation that specializes in financial software. Specfically, the company develops personal finance, accounting, and tax return software.
The company is headquartered in Mountain View, California. It has more than 10,000 employees.
While Intuit has a GitHub presence with over 100 repositories for numerous open source projects, none of these repositories offer any substantial desktop software. Instead, the repositories focus on tools and libraries for developers. None of these projects appear to have attracted significant interest from the open source community.
Intuit Inc. is an American corporation that specializes in financial software. Specifically, the company develops personal finance, accounting, and tax return software.
The company is headquartered in Mountain View, California. It has more than 10,000 employees.
While Intuit has a GitHub presence with over 100 repositories for numerous open source projects, none of these repositories offer any substantial desktop software. Instead, the repositories focus on tools and libraries for developers. None of these projects appear to have attracted significant interest from the open source community.
Hugin panorama stitcher finally released version 2021. Here’s how to install it via PPA in Ubuntu 18.04, Ubuntu 20.04, Ubuntu 21.04, Ubuntu 21.10, and Linux Mint 20.
This article is a collection of ideas to practice selfhosting with Yunohost for beginners who are learning system administration. Yunohost is like magic, this server OS allows us to deploy a full, working email server in one click and that works for other kinds of server too. Now, let's see the ideas!
The Anklang project is a digital audio synthesis application for live creation and composition of music or other audio material. It merges several new developments and (Beast) rewriting efforts by Stefan Westerfeld and me.
Starting a new project from scratch was the easier and quicker approach, with all the changes involved in moving to a modern file format, recreating the UI in a new language plus new technologies, using a new IPC layer and reinventing the synthesis engine in modern C++.
This brought much quicker results, compared to continued work on the aging Beast code base and a conversion tool is being worked on to carry over what is possible from old files. The tool is set to be integrated when the Anklang features set is ripe.
This pre-release show cases some of the new technologies, although the code still has alpha quality, others are still in the queue to be integrated soon and unpolished areas are also to be addressed. Currently, it may be an interesting piece for the adventurous to play around with, so feedback or contributions will be very welcome.
Say you have a PDF document in your hands. Say this documents needs editing and redacting. You may want to add some bits of information and obscure some other bits of information. Various PDF programs can do this job for you. However, quite often, the new changes are added as layers on top of the original, so people with the right kind of expertise can glean the data from under the redaction markers.
Some time ago, I published a tutorial showing how to flatten PDF files, which basically means putting all of the changes into a single layer. Now, I want to show you another trick, and this is how to convert PDF files into images. This will create a similar effect - flattening, plus the ability to use (only) parts of information contained in the PDF documents. Our tool of the trade will be pdftocairo. In Linux. Let's commence.
Linux is a buffet for different tools and utilities, some last longer, and others are deprecated with better alternatives.
Today we are looking at how to install the latest version of Blender 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.
Virtualization on Ubuntu is one of its strengths. However, setting up a VM as a new user can be tedious and confusing. That’s where Quickemu comes in. It harnesses the power of QEMU in the Linux kernel and automatically spins up virtual machines fast. Here’s how to use it on your Ubuntu system.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Nginx on CentOS 9 Stream. For those of you who didn’t know, Nginx (Engine X) is the most popular, powerful web server software that can be used on your server. It is also known for its high performance and low memory usage. In addition to its HTTP server capabilities, NGINX can also function as a proxy server for e-mail (IMAP, POP3, and SMTP) and a reverse proxy and load balancer for HTTP, TCP, and UDP servers.
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 the Nginx web server on CentOS 9 Stream.
We have come to a point in history where at-a-distance communication has become an essential part of our daily lives. This applies to jobs and all kinds of areas of day-to-day activities. We require a communication program that works smoothly and has impressive features to go well. Enter, Discord.
Discord has made quite a name for itself even among the vast competition in the category that it belongs to. It has excellent features, works without a hassle, is available on various platforms, and gives the users a great experience. Today, we will check how to install and use Discord on Linux.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install PyCharm on Fedora 35. For those of you who didn’t know, PyCharm is a cross-platform editor developed by JetBrains. Pycharm provides all the tools you need for productive Python development. Many Python programmers enjoy using PyCharm because it can be used to analyze code, debug programs, and is integrated with Git and other version control systems. Pycharm comes with two variants, Professional (Paid) and Community (Free). The professional edition comes with additional web development support.
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 the PyCharm IDE on a Fedora 35.
Learn the simple commands to install Plex Media Server on Debian 11 Bullseye Linux for creating your streaming server.
Plex was started as a hobby project but with time, it developed into a professional streaming server software to manage various types of media files. Users can install and use it to access their videos, music, and images remotely using the internet or locally over a local network; even you can share them with friends while on the move.
You will have the same feel as Netflix, as Plex creates matching thumbnails and loads information from film databases. However, Plex can’t keep up with major streaming providers like Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV +, and Disney +. Nevertheless, it has not been developed to compete with them. The main goal of its developers is to provide an easy-to-use piece of software to general users or businesses who want to manage their database of films, photos, and songs either on NAS, Cloud, or any PC.
When they were first announced, I, like many others, had hoped to be holding a Steam Deck this Christmas. But it's a hard time to manufacture tech right now, and so we're going to have to wait a little longer.
But in that time I've been spending more energy experiencing PC gaming on Linux, the base for the Steam Deck. Much has been said already about Proton and much more will be said in the months to come, but there's one bit of 'special sauce' that deserves more attention because it should be a huge deal on Valve's portable gaming PC.
AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) is, in simple terms, like NVIDIA's DLSS. It uses witchcraft to intelligently upscale games while preserving as much detail as possible so as to enable higher frame rates thanks to having been rendered initially at a lower resolution. One big difference is that FSR works on both AMD and NVIDIA hardware, and the other is that it's open-source. This means the Linux gang has been all over it.
Arch Linux had a pretty great year with introducing "Archinstall" as part of the official install media as a new, optional installer for conveniently installing the distribution to Valve choosing Arch Linux as their new SteamOS 3.0 base that will power their forthcoming Steam Deck handheld game console.
By nearly any indicator, Arch Linux had a pretty great 2021. Arguably most exciting is the Steam Deck / SteamOS switching to Arch Linux where as previously Valve relied upon Debian that fell stale too quickly. Using Arch Linux will allow for more fast-paced updates and ensuring the newest, most optimal experience for their Linux-based handheld slated to start shipping next quarter. Until getting out new SteamOS images, Valve has been encouraging developers to test on the Arch-based Manjaro Linux distribution that is desktop-oriented and easy to use.
December has been a slow month for Xfce apps development, but we got a new update of the Xfce Terminal modern terminal emulator app to version 0.9.1, which adds an overlay-scrolling preference, support for the new Shortcuts editor widget, and a new preference to select the right-click action.
In addition, the Xfce Terminal 0.9.1 release improved the scrolling-on-output behavior and the Paste dialog, and addressed several regressions and updated multiple language translations.
There are several screenshot tools available for Linux. I prefer using Flameshot for screenshots and Shutter for editing the existing screenshots.
But Flameshot doesn’t work with 4K screens, unfortunately. And hence I had to resort back to the default GNOME screenshot tool which works perfectly on my Dell XPS with Ultra HD screen.
Libadwaita 1.0 has been released, kickstarting a new era in GTK app development.
Now, there’s been a fair bit of controversy and misunderstanding over what libadwaita is and isn’t. It’s pitched as a library that implements the (new) GNOME HIG, and is a GTK4-based successor to the GTK3-based libhandy library that has, over the past few years, given GTK apps lots of cool adaptive capabilities.
Libadwaita is set to become tightly intwined with GNOME as, in a break with the past, this library comes with a stylesheet —what we think of as GTK themes are actually just stylesheets— baked in. This means anything built using libadwaita (i.e., like a lot of GNOME 42) should look virtually the same wherever it runs regardless of what GTK theme is set.
Libadwaita 1.0 has been released, just at the end of the year.
Libadwaita is a library implementing the GNOME HIG, complementing GTK. For GTK 3 this role has increasingly been played by Libhandy, and so Libadwaita is a direct Libhandy successor.
You can read more in Adrien’s announcement.
[...]
Ever since Adwaita started using SCSS, it couldn’t really be recolored at all without recompiling it. This created big problems for applications that wanted to do that.
For example, GNOME Web makes its header bar blue in incognito mode. This may sound simple, but involves copy-pasting large chunks of Adwaita into the app itself and making many small changes everywhere to adjust it, as well as using SCSS for it because the original style is SCSS. More recently, GNOME Console and Apostrophe started doing the same thing – copy-pasted from Web, as a matter of fact. This approach means the style is messy and extremely hard to keep up to date with Adwaita changes – I have updated this style for the 3.32 style refresh and never want to do this again.
Another approach applications like Contrast are using (were using with GTK 3, anyway), is copying the whole stylesheet from GTK, and using libsass to recompile it in runtime. This worked – it’s much more maintainable than the first approach, but fell apart when libsass got deprecated.
Meanwhile, the elementary OS stylesheet has been doing recoloring just fine with nothing but @define-color – and so Libadwaita does exactly that, it exposes all of the colors it uses (31 as of the moment of writing) as named colors. The new colors are also documented and will be treated as a proper API.
It also drops all of the formerly used PNG assets, so the colors can affect the elements that used them.
It also reworks the high contrast variant to use the same colors when possible to make sure that changing color for the regular style also works with high contrast.
GNOME's libadwaita 1.0 has been released for this library implementing the GNOME Human Interface Guidelines (HIG) and complementary to the GTK toolkit.
Libadwaita 1.0 is the successor to libhandy that complemented GTK3. Libadwaita 1.0 offers a reworked stylesheet now that the Adwaita style has become part of the library rather than within GTK. This new libadwaita style is designed to be more modern, supports runtime recoloring, a more proper dark variant contrast, style classes updates, API to support the new cross-desktop dark style preference, improved notifications, and much more.
Version 1.0 of the GNOME libadwaita library is out; this will be of interest to GNOME application developers. "Libadwaita is a library implementing the GNOME HIG, complementing GTK. For GTK 3 this role has increasingly been played by Libhandy, and so Libadwaita is a direct Libhandy successor."
Still based on the Ubuntu 20.04.3 LTS release of the long-term supported Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa) operating system series from Canonical, the Linux Lite 5.8 distribution release promises updated components, bug fixes, and many other tweaks and changes.
Don’t get too excited because Linux Lite 5.8 is an incremental update to the previous releases in the Linux Lite 5 series. As such, it would appear that the major changes of this upcoming update are an updated Papirus icon theme and nine new wallpapers to make your Linux Lite desktop experience more enjoyable.
Windows 11 is a great operating system. In fact, I can confidently say it is the best desktop operating system Microsoft has ever created. Seriously, folks, it is wonderful. If your computer is compatible with it, and you like Windows 10, you should enjoy Windows 11 even more.
With all of that said, Windows 11 can be a bit polarizing. It features radical changes to the user interface (such as a centered task bar) which I adore, but some users may dislike. Not to mention, the system requirements will leave many still-capable computers unable to upgrade without using unofficial hacks. Even worse, computers deemed incompatible could eventually stop getting updates! These unfortunate computer owners will have to decide whether to continue using Windows 10 or buy a new Windows 11-compatible PC.
Dear Tumbleweed users and hackers,
The last week of the year, and the last day of the year, are coming to an end. Tumbleweed had a small dip, as the last two snapshots that moved to openQA had to be stopped from being published. Nevertheless, we still managed to publish 6 snapshots before heading out to the new-year celebrations (1223…1228).
We’ve made it to the end of 2021, and I’m filled with so many emotions. On the one hand, I’m extremely proud of the work we have done this year. But on the other hand… when I wrote last year’s love letter, I thought we’d surely be able to celebrate our successes in person this year. Unfortunately, the global situation doesn’t seem to be getting any better. Our usual European winter events — DevConf.CZ and FOSDEM — are both virtual again. While I continue to hold out hope that we’ll be able to share a meal together soon, there are no clear dates in sight.
So, as we close out 2021 and approach the two-year mark of the pandemic, I’d like us all to take a moment to reflect on how we’ve continued to be a thriving community this year. Nest With Fedora brought together over 700 Fedorans—nearly twice the size of Nest 2020. We expanded our annual Fedora Women’s Day to Fedora Week of Diversity, celebrating the rich diversity that makes Fedora a great community. And we upgraded the way we communicate, bringing more conversation to Discussion and adding a new chat server using the open Matrix protocol. And all of that featured our new logo, introduced this spring.
Of course, as much as we love the Friends foundation, this community is about more than just having fun together. We also produce an excellent operating system. Fedora Workstation 34 led the way among major desktop distributions by featuring GNOME 40—a significant improvement to the widely-used desktop environment. We also changed the default audio system to PipeWire. And even though we broke our on-time streak with Fedora Linux 35, that just shows how seriously we take quality — we want to be leading edge, not “bleeding edge”, and we continue to demonstrate that in what we deliver to users.
2021 has been an exciting year for Kubernetes, and these articles prove it. From fun interfaces to homelabs to development environments, check out my favorite articles from 2021, K8s style.
If you are interested in the fundamentals, this article about containers on Linux clarifies how Linux containers work from the inside out. Are you more interested in having some fun? Install minikube and start managing it using the DOOM video game as an interface. An alternative to DOOM is kubectl, a more traditional Kubernetes control CLI. Even if you only run Kubernetes on your Linux homelab, you can use tools like Terraform and Helm to automate day-to-day operations. This creates an opportunity to get better at Terraform.
One of the few things that are certain in life is that computers will fail in weird and interesting ways. Monitor your Kubernetes cluster with Prometheus and Grafana to see how it fails. Monitor the applications running inside it with distributed tracing using Grafana Tempo. Monitor how strong your monitoring is by introducing Chaos Mesh to cause intentional chaos in Kubernetes.
This was an amazing year for the Enable Sysadmin community. In 2021, our site traffic grew to more than 600,000 page views per month, 100,000 per month over 2020. We generated more than 7.2 million page views and 4.2 million unique visitors in 2021.
When I discussed these challenges with the instructors on our platform, one solution kept coming up again and again: Gratitude.
Showing gratitude doesn’t just mean being nice for the sake of being nice. Gratitude has real business value. A ten-year, 200,000-person study by O.C. Tanner found that 79 percent of respondents who’d quit their jobs cited lack of appreciation as a key factor in their departure. In addition, 65 percent of North Americans surveyed felt that they had not been recognized even once in the prior year. That’s a dangerous position for any company to be in.
This is why CIOs and IT leaders, in particular, must be cognizant of team morale and keep the gratitude flowing. It’s not always easy under pressure, but here are three elements to keep in mind.
A few weeks ago The Economist published The World Ahead 2022, its 36th annual look at the economic, political, social and cultural trends that will likely shape the coming year. “If 2021 was the year the world turned the tide against the pandemic, 2022 will be dominated by the need to adjust to new realities, both in areas reshaped by the crisis (the new world of work, the future of travel) and as deeper trends reassert themselves (the rise of China, accelerating climate change),” wrote the issue’s editor Tom Sandage.
Today is the unfortunate day marking CentOS Linux 8 reaching end-of-life status as a free alternative to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.
It was a year ago CentOS / Red Hat announced their shift in focus on CentOS Stream as being the new upstream of Red Hat Enterprise Linux moving forward. CentOS Stream has been taking shape this year while unfortunately it means the EOL'ing of CentOS Linux 8.
In December 2020, the CentOS Project announced a series of changes. The three most important are: the creation of CentOS Stream and the consequent rename of CentOS (the classic Linux distribution the project is known for) in CentOS Linux the anticipation to today (31/12/2021) of the End Of Life for CentOS Linux 8 the fact that CentOS Linux 8 is going to be the last and that from now on, only CentOS Stream will have new releases That announcement created a lot of different sentiments in the community and even more among the CentOS Linux users.
This step by step tutorial explains how to migrate to AlmaLinux 8 from CentOS 8 using Almalinux-deploy script. Using Almalinux-deploy script, we can easily convert CentOS machines (hopefully other Enterprise Linux systems) to AlmaLinux.
It is written in Bash and the source code is available in GitHub. Now let us go ahead and migrate from CentOS to AlmaLinux with almalinux-deploy script.
This is guide, howto install NVIDIA proprietary drivers (manually using .run files) on CentOS Stream 9/8, Red Hat (RHEL) 9.0/8.5, Rocky Linux 8.5 and disable Nouveau driver. This guide works with GeForce 8/9/200/300/400/500/600/700/800/900/10/20/30 series cards.
With six DOF (degrees of freedom) and consisting of four segments, the Z1 has a maximum speed of 180 degrees per second, uses the Ubuntu operating system, and has a plethora of applications. It is compatible with mobile robots, including Unitree’s Aliengo and B1 quadrupeds.
The Astro Slide is a smartphone with a 6.5 inch AMOLED touchscreen display, a MediaTek Dimensity 800 processor, 8GB of RAM, 128GB of storage, a 4,000 mAh battery and support for wireless charging. But those aren’t the features that make this phone unusual.
It also has a physical keyboard that slides out from behind the display, allowing you to use the Astro Slide like a tiny laptop computer. And while it will ship with Android, the phone is also working with mobile Linux developers to ensure that it will be able to support GNU/Linux distributions like Ubuntu Touch.
Intel in cooperation with the Alliance for Open Media continues developing SVT-AV1 as the flagship CPU-based AV1 video encoder. With the next SVT-AV1 update there are performance optimizations as well as several new preset levels allowing for even greater performance. Here are some early benchmarks of that updated SVT-AV1.
“There's nothing magical about open-source methodology and security,” Vaughan-Nichols notes. “Linus's law is that given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow. But, if not enough developers are looking, security vulnerabilities will still go unnoticed.” And, according to what he is calling Schneier's law, "Security is a process, not a product,” and “constant vigilance is needed to secure all software.”
A given at the first of each year is CES. Formally called the Consumer Electronic Show, the event practically takes over Las Vegas for a few days every January, and every company that even dabbles in electronics is on hand to show off their latest offerings.
How big is it? In 2019, more than 182,000 people attended and more than 4,400 vendors exhibited their wares. How important is being there to vendors? In 2020, Apple made its first appearance at the event in 27 years, if that tells you anything.
In 2021, when there was no in-person event due to COVID, organizers pulled out all the stops to create an engaging virtual event, featuring a live digital performance by Billie Eilish as a lead-in to a discussion session on digital performances in whic Ryan Seacrest spoke with Billie Eilish and Dua Lipa.
Merged yesterday into the LibreOffice code-base was introducing yet another graphics drawing back-end for this open-source office suite.
SvpGraphicsBackend is this new VCL (Visual Class Library) back-end for LibreOffice. SvpGraphicsBackend is being used as a new back-end around Cairo. There is already SvpSalGraphics for LibreOffice that uses Cairo for drawing while SvpGraphicsBackend is being worked into the new implementation alongside the various other VCL graphics/drawing back-ends for the cross-platform office suite.
Tomaà ¾ Vajngerl of Collabora has been working on this new Cairo back-end that was merged on Thursday. So far there have been a few more follow-up commits beginning to move more functionality into SvpGraphicsBackend.
With 4 development versions released already, you know that we are working very hard on the future: GIMP 3.0.
Some features took a lot of time, mostly when we changed core logics. I am thinking in particular about the code for multi-selection of layers. It’s not that selecting multiple items in a list is hard to implement, it’s that any feature in the whole application has been forever expecting just one layer or one channel selected. So what happens when there are 2, 3 or any number of items selected? Every feature, every tool, every plug-in and filter has to be rethought for this new use case. This is a huge work and it has been 2 years I have been on and off on this one in between porting or developing other code and reviewing contributors’ code. Fortunately this change is nearing the end lately (not completely finished though). So that’s a great progress.
By the way, a part of this work has been to get rid of the “link” (chain ââºâ icon in the Layers dockable) concept in favor of multi-selection (and layer search and storage as a replacement concept for the ability to save layer links). This part is also done now. I’ll talk more about this in the GIMP 2.99.10 release news.
From Kate’s development perspective this year looks fantastic. If you track a bit the development via our merge requests overview page or even better participate yourself in our projects, you might have already noticed it ;=)
I am working out how to do things in /usr/sbin/mscw (Multiple Sound Card Wizard). A huge issue for me has been moving from alsa to pulseaudio. Here is a link to earlier work:
https://bkhome.org/news/202111/how-pulseaudio-is-implemented-in-easyos.html
I am still very uncertain about aspects of the interaction between alsa and pa. The single most important feature is /etc/alsa/conf.d/99-pulseaudio-default.conf, that essentially directs alsa output to the pa server.
In mscw, I want a quick check of output volume and muted/unmuted status for a particular card. It can be done using 'pactl' or 'pacmd', pa utilities, however, I wanted to do it at the "alsa level", with an alsa utility...
I am gradually working toward putting information from blog posts onto the easyos.org front page.
It was just this month that Mold 1.0 premiered as a very promising, high performance linker alternative to GNU's Gold and LLVM's LLD linkers. GCC 12 added support for Mold this week and now for ending out the year Mold 1.0.1 has been released.
Mold 1.0.1 is just a maintenance release but given the young age of the project there are a number of fixes as well as new features squeezed in. Mold 1.0.1 now optionally includes its own xxHash library for building but can still use a system-wide xxHash library if desired, support for the "--color-diagnostics" option, the "--threads=" option is now supported as an alias of its existing "--thread-count=" option, and support for a number of other options.
So, 2021 was no 2020, even if it borrowed many of the same contours of that wretched year. But it was still the calendar equivalent of me walking down the street after I rolled my ankle, pretending that everything is OK, even though my ankle was telling me otherwise. (I often wince when reading descriptions of people rolling their ankles, so if that describes you, I apologize in advance.) Many folks got vaccinated this year. Some even got boosters. But COVID-19 remains an extremely dynamic part of the way that we live and experience the world. But even if optimism was in short supply (and less so after learning that as I was posting this, Betty White died just three weeks before her 100th birthday), tedium was in ample supply. And with that, let’s do another one of these year-end issues (the eighth one!) where we try to look forward and back all at once.
Security updates have been issued by Debian (agg, aria2, fort-validator, and lxml), Fedora (libgda, pgbouncer, and xorg-x11-server-Xwayland), Mageia (calibre, e2guardian, eclipse, libtpms/swtpm, nodejs, python-lxml, and toxcore), openSUSE (c-toxcore, gegl, getdata, kernel-firmware, log4j, postrsd, and privoxy), and SUSE (gegl).
The diffoscope maintainers are pleased to announce the release of diffoscope version 198. This version includes the following changes:
[ Chris Lamb ] * Support showing "Ordering differences only" within .dsc field values. (Closes: #1002002, reproducible-builds/diffoscope#297) * Support OCaml versions 4.11, 4.12 and 4.13. (Closes: #1002678) * Add support for XMLb files. (Closes: reproducible-builds/diffoscope#295) * Also add, for example, /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu to our internal PATH.
[ Mattia Rizzolo ] * Also recognize "GnuCash file" files as XML.
In the past two weeks, Log4j has continued to drive security news, with more vulnerable platforms being found, and additional CVEs coming out. First up is work done by TrendMicro, looking at electric vehicles and chargers. They found a log4j attack in one of the published charger frameworks, and also managed to observe evidence of vulnerability in the Tesla In-Vehicle Infotainment system. It isn’t a stretch to imagine a piece of malware that could run on both a charger, and an EV. And since those systems talk to each other, they could spread the virus through cars moving from charger to charger.
Log4j is now up to 2.17.1, as there is yet another RCE to fix, CVE-2021-44832. This one is only scored a 6.6 on the CVSS scale, as opposed to the original, which weighed in at a 10. 44832 requires the attacker to first exert control over the Log4j configuration, making exploitation much more difficult. This string of follow-on vulnerabilities demonstrates a well-known pattern, where a high profile vulnerability attracts the attention of researchers, who find other problems in the same code.
There are now reports of Log4j being used in Conti ransomware campaigns. Additionally, a Marai-based worm has been observed. This self-propagating attack seems to be targeting Tomcat servers, among others.
On a Sunday night in September, Ashley Estrada was at a friend’s home in Los Angeles when she received a strange notification on her iPhone: “AirTag Detected Near You.”
An AirTag is a 1.26-inch disc with location-tracking capabilities that Apple started selling earlier this year as a way “to keep track of your stuff.” Ms. Estrada, 24, didn’t own one, nor did the friends she was with. The notification on her phone said the AirTag had first been spotted with her four hours earlier. A map of the AirTag’s history showed the zigzag path Ms. Estrada had driven across the city while running errands.
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The New York Times spoke with seven women who believe they were tracked with AirTags, including a 17-year-old whose mother surreptitiously placed one on her car to stay apprised of her whereabouts.
Some authorities have begun to take a closer look at the threat posed by AirTags. The West Seneca Police Department in New York recently warned its community of the tracking potential of the devices after an AirTag was found on a car bumper. Apple complied with a subpoena for information about the AirTag in the case, which may lead to charges, West Seneca police said.
And in Canada, a local police department said that it had investigated five incidents of thieves placing AirTags on “high-end vehicles so they can later locate and steal them.”
Researchers now believe AirTags, which are equipped with Bluetooth technology, could be revealing a more widespread problem of tech-enabled tracking. They emit a digital signal that can be detected by devices running Apple’s mobile operating system. Those devices then report where an AirTag has last been seen. Unlike similar tracking products from competitors such as Tile, Apple added features to prevent abuse, including notifications like the one Ms. Estrada received and automatic beeping. (Tile plans to release a feature to prevent the tracking of people next year, a spokeswoman for that company said.)
