We had another full week in the world of Linux releases with SparkyLinux 2022.03, Bluestar Linux 5.16.12, ArcoLinux 22.03.08, Zorin OS 16.1, and Robolinux 12.04.
With a full Linux desktop, you don't have to give up your Windows programs. Linux has supported various ways to run Windows alongside Linux from the beginning.
The classic option is dual-booting, using a bootloader to choose between the two systems at boot time. You can also run Windows or desktop Linux in a virtual machine, depending on which system you use less frequently. If you want to run Windows programs, but you're dead-set on only running Linux, you can use Wine or Proton.
You have options when you want to run Windows and Linux apps. You could keep Windows around for games and other programs you need while using Linux to learn more about computers, programming, system administration, or operating systems in general. It's a nice division of labor.
Source code licensing can be very complex and because of this there are loop holes which can arise with GPL style licenses where companies can completely avoid sharing the source code. Remember I'm not a lawyer, seek a professional for actual legal advice
Josh and Kurt talk about the Linux Kernel Dirty Pipe security vulnerability. This bug is an amazing combination of amazing complexity, incredible simplicity, and a little bit of luck. The discovery is amazing, the analysis is enlightening. There’s almost no way a bug like this could be found outside of open source.
What do ransomware blackmailers ask for when they don’t want money? Why did Firefox get two updates in three days? How did Adafruit get hoist by the petard of “shadow IT”? And what’s with those dirty Linux pipes?
You might've seen a penguin logo somewhere on the internet when reading about Linux. So how did a penguin become the official Linux mascot?
What's the first thing that pops into your mind when you think of Linux? If it is a cherubic, rotund penguin, you're referring to Tux, the current age iconic brand identifier of Linux.
But did you know, it was a good five years before Linux got a penguin for a brand ambassador? The story behind how the famous mascot was born and how the Linux penguin name came to be, makes for some interesting trivia, especially if you're a fan of the open-source kernel and its lineage.
So last weekend, I thought I'd be releasing the final 5.17 today.
That was then, this is now. Last week was somewhat messy, mostly because of embargoed patches we had pending with another variation of spectre attacks. And while the patches were mostly fine, we had the usual "because it was hidden, all our normal testing automation didn't see it either".
And once the automation sees things, it tests all the insane combinations that people don't tend to actually use or test in any normal case, and so there was a (small) flurry of fixes for the fixes.
None of this was really surprising, but I naïvely thought I'd be able to do the final release this weekend anyway.
And honestly, I considered it. I don't think we really have any pending issues that would hold up a release, but on the other hand we also really don't have any reason _not_ to give it another week with all the proper automated testing. So that's what I'm doing, and as a result we have an -rc8 release today instead of doing a final 5.17.
There's a number of non-spectre things in here too, of course. Among other things, people finally chased down a couple of mislaid patches that had been on the regression list, so hopefully we have those all nailed down now too.
And obviously there's all the usual random fixes in here too. But because of the spectre thing, about half of the -rc8 patch is architecture updates.
That said, it's still a fairly _small_ half of the patch. It was not one of the "big disaster" hw speculation things, it was mostly extending existing mitigations and reporting.
Anyway, let's not keep the testing _just_ to automation - the more the merrier, and real-life loads are always more interesting than what the automation farms do. So please do give this last rc a quick try,
Linus
Linus has released 5.17-rc8 rather than the final 5.17 kernel.
The Linux kernel has existed for more than 30 years. Over time, several technologies considered innovative, become obsolete giving way to something more modern.
Although it is possible to maintain certain living technologies for a few years in favor of retro-compatibility. This “survival” can disrupt innovation and creation of tools more suitable for the reality in which we live; and the Linux kernel team knows this well.
In this article, you will find a brief description of the fork system call and how it works.
This article requires that you have some background knowledge of the concept of process in any operating system.
From its beginning, Unix and all the operating systems based on it were text-based. It means that you have to learn a set of commands and use them to perform various operations. With the passage of time, Graphical User Interfaces (GUI) were included in almost all operating systems. Soon GUI get popular as they are user-friendly and easy to understand and use, especially for beginners.
The X window system (also known as X11 or simply X) provides GUI facilities both to a local desktop and in a network environment. In this tutorial, you will learn about the X window system, how it works, its elements, and some of its advantages.
Today we are looking at how to install Discord 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.
In this video, we are looking at how to install the Brave Beta browser on Zorin OS 16.
KDE today announces the release of KDE Frameworks 5.92.0.
KDE Frameworks are 83 addon libraries to Qt which provide a wide variety of commonly needed functionality in mature, peer reviewed and well tested libraries with friendly licensing terms. For an introduction see the KDE Frameworks release announcement.
This release is part of a series of planned monthly releases making improvements available to developers in a quick and predictable manner.
GNOME 42 Beta, the devs added the ability to take screenshots of the current window with the Shift+PrntScrn keyboard shortcut, the ability to switch workspaces with Home and End keys in Activities Overview, the ability to cancel ongoing update downloads in GNOME Software when system power is low, and G722 as the preferred codec for SIP calls in the new GNOME Calls app.
GNOME 42 Release Candidate also improves gnome-bluetooth to allow GNOME Shell’s Bluetooth menu to appear when expected and to make the Connect switch available for Bluetooth LE MIDI devices. GNOME Boxes received the ability to recommend the latest operating system releases for download when they’re available in osinfo-db.
Linux is an open-source operating system that has been growing in popularity in recent years. It is often praised for its stability and security, as well as its low system requirements. In this blog post, we will discuss the best Linux distros for beginners in 2022.
Distro stands for “distribution” and refers to the specific flavor of Linux you are using. There are many different distros available, each with its own unique features and benefits. We will also take a look at the advantages of using Linux, and what you need to know before making the switch.
IPFire 2.27 Core Update 164 is here as the first release of the IPFire Linux firewall to be powered by the Linux 5.15 LTS kernel series, which is supported until October 2023. As you can expect, the new kernel improves compatibility with newer hardware components, adds security and bug fixes, enables virtualization support with libvirt and KVM, and improves the performance of cryptographic operations on the AArch64 (ARM64) architecture.
We're happy to release OSMC's March update, our first update of 2022. This has a number of improvements and bug fixes. We had planned to release an update the end of January -- but decided to hold off until we could release a more substantial update, as there will be a delay in getting the next significant changes out.
In the background, we're laying the groundwork for a number of other changes which will be released in the near future, including improvements to video playback for Vero 4K/4K+; a number of Raspberry Pi improvements and finalising the move to Debian Bullseye.
Historically, Ubuntu Long-term support (LTS) versions were always supported with updates for 5 years after the release date. So for example, Ubuntu 12.04 LTS was supported with updates from 2012 to 2017.
However, Canonical announced last year that it is going to extend this support period up to 10 years for Ubuntu Advantage users. Ubuntu Advantage is a subscription service from Canonical that can be used to add additional security and hardening features to the default Ubuntu installation, whether on desktops, servers or the cloud.
This means, for example, that you can extend your Ubuntu 20.04 LTS installation support period to 10 years instead of 5, so that it can continue to be supported with updates until 2030. A very nice feature indeed, because it means you won’t have to bother with the underlying OS for a very, very long period of time, and will just have to focus on your own workflow.
Canonical, publisher of Ubuntu, along with cPanel announced they are expanding collaboration to provide full support for Ubuntu LTS 20.04 with cPanel and WHM version 102. The collaboration with Canonical will give cPanel and WHM Ubuntu users more open-source Linux distribution architecture options within their current infrastructure while providing a more robust business suite of solutions to help customers scale and expand their business hosting operations.
My Raspberry Pi 3 is now back in a box with a few other old Raspberry Pis. Today I've moved my files and backup to a Raspberry Pi 1B, meaning that's now isolated from the Raspberry Pi 2 that runs my services.
That really feels good. My previous server started out as just a file server only accessible over ssh, because I use sshfs to mount it on my other machines. Then I started tinkering with other things on it, because it was already there. It was handy.
[...]
The backup server runs sshd, and that's pretty much it. A cron job takes backups every now and then from the home directories on it and from the service server, and from another server that I help maintain. It's a very simple setup.
Spring is almost here, in the northern hemisphere, and that means it is time for another monthly service pack update for postmarketOS v21.12! This update brings a few bug fixes and package upgrades from edge to the stable release.
When it comes to smartphones, the most popular ones are iPhone and Android. However, other tech companies are diving into the market.
One of them is Planet Computers, which just launched Astro Slide 5G. This smartphone is packed with updated specifications, running popular Linux distributions instead of Android 11.
As the name suggests, a view can be a glance at a database record from a different site. A view in PostgreSQL is a subset of one or more tables to see the important data. We mostly create views to execute the most-used query in the database. Those, who don’t have any understanding of Database views, will get some knowledge today. Therefore, we will be discussing a method to create, use and drop the views in the PostgreSQL database.
You may have worked on Html, XML, and CSS while learning web designing. XML is said to be an extensible markup language that contains user-defined tags without already defined tags as the “Html” language has. While working in the PostgreSQL database, there come situations when you have to save the XML type data in your tables. Most of the students get confused about fetching such sort of data from the PostgreSQL database tables. Therefore, the PostgreSQL database provides us with the “XPath” function to fetch and modify the XML type data columns. Thus, this article will contain an explanation of using the Xpath function in the PostgreSQL database. Let’s initiate and make sure to not skip any step.
Hello! Today I want to talk about – how do you know you’re getting better at programming?
Less (stands for Leaner Style Sheets) is a backwards-compatible language extension for Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). This dynamic preprocessor style sheet language can be compiled into CSS and run on the client side or server side.
Less provides the following mechanisms: variables, nesting, mixins, operators and functions; the main difference between Less and other CSS precompilers is that Less allows real-time compilation via less.js by the browser.
Because Less looks just like CSS, learning it is easy. Less only makes a few convenient additions to the CSS language, which is one of the reasons it can be learned so quickly.
When a person owns the home they live in, often the only approval they need for modifications is from their significant other or roommate. In the worst case, maybe a permit is required. But those who rent their dwellings are far more constrained in almost every case, and when it comes to environmental controls, they are most decidedly off limits. Unless you’re a resourceful hacker like [Nik], that is, who has seamlessly integrated his apartment’s ventilation system into his smart home controller — all without any permanent modifications!
[G3R] writes to us about a mod they did on a HP ProDesk/EliteDesk 400 G3 miniPC they use as a home emulation center. The miniPC would overheat as soon as the CPU load increased, resulting in frame drops and stutters, as well as throttling CPU. [G3R] took the original cooling solution, threw out half of it and modified the remaining half to accept a tower CPU cooler.
By now we’re all used to the idea of three dimensional printing, as over the last fifteen years or so it’s become an indispensable tool for anyone with an interest in making things without an industrial scale budget. There are still a few limitations to the techniques used in a common 3D printer though, in particular being tied to layers in a single orientation. It’s something that can be addressed by adding tilt and rotational axes to the printer to deliver a five-axis device, but this has not been available in an affordable form. [Freddie Hong] and colleagues have tackled the production of an affordable printer, and his solution fits neatly on the bed of a Prusa i3 to convert it to five-axis machine without breaking the bank.
A knob is a knob, a switch is a switch, and that’s that, right? And what about those knobs that have detents, set in stone at the time of manufacturing? Oh, and those knobs that let you jog left to right and then snap back to center — that can’t be modified…right? Well, you likely know where this is going, and in the video below the break, [scottbez1] shows off a new open source haptic input knob that can be€ all of these things with just some configuration changes!
When we see [Ken Shirriff] reverse engineering something, it tends to be on the microscopic level. His usual forte is looking at die photos of strange and obsolete chips and figuring out how they work. And while we love those efforts, it’s nice to see him in the macro world this time with a teardown and repair of a 1960s-era solderless breadboard system.
First of all, there are definitely simpler ways to monitor remote temperatures, but [Mike]’s remote MQTT temperature sensor and display project is useful in a few ways. Not only does it lay out how to roll such a system from scratch, but it also showcases system features like solar power.
The West began actively investing in Ukraine’s cyber defenses following the 2015 power grid hack and the 2017 Petya malware attack. The electrical grid attack left more than 200,000 people without power for several hours while the Petya malware disrupted key Ukrainian institutions, including banks, government ministries and companies.
If you’re keeping your existing phone, but getting a new number, the Change Number feature will let you keep your profile and all of your existing messages and groups on your device, while making you reachable at your new phone number.
Instagram notes that creators can assign a moderator by tapping the three dots in the comment bar during a Live. From there, they can choose a moderator from a list of suggested accounts, or use the search bar to search for a specific account.
And the taxpayer-funded corporation has hinted that such logins may also become mandatory for other digital services, with its chair Ita Buttrose not ruling it out, by saying in a response to the APF: "There are no current plans to make a login requirement necessary for other ABC digital products."
Buttrose's statement was part of a short response sent to the APF on 8 March. It was made public only on Monday, along with the APF's reply. For the most part, the APF made the same arguments as it did in the original letter which iTWire reported on 3 March.
Russian forces on Sunday bombed a Ukrainian military facility located just 22 miles from the border of NATO member Poland, killing at least 35 people and injuring dozens more.
Prior to Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the facility hosted NATO drills and U.S. troops used it to train Ukrainian forces on the deployment of anti-tank missiles and other weaponry. The base has been described as "a vital link in the pipeline to get weapons from NATO allies into Ukraine."
Offering predictions about what will follow the Russia-Ukraine conflict is probably a foolhardy exercise, but here are a few thoughts that might engender further speculation and discussion.
Tens of thousands of people took to the streets to join anti-war demonstrations across Europe on Sunday as Russia continued its deadly assault on Ukraine, bombarding major cities and intensifying a humanitarian crisis that is having reverberating effects worldwide.
In addition to protests in Berlin, London, Warsaw, and Madrid—where participants carried signs and banners that read "Stop the War" and "Peace and Solidarity for the People in Ukraine"—demonstrations sprang up on a smaller scale in occupied Ukrainian cities and in Moscow, despite the threat of arrest and police brutality.
In Surgut, Siberia, police fined an unnamed person 40,000 roubles (€£320) for posting a message on the VKontakte social networking site that the authorities did not approve of.
Each year during Sunshine Week (March 13-19), The Foilies serve up tongue-in-cheek "awards" for government agencies and assorted institutions that stand in the way of access to information. The Electronic Frontier Foundation and MuckRock combine forces to collect horror stories about Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and state-level public records requests from journalists and transparency advocates across the United States and beyond. Our goal is to identify the most surreal document redactions, the most aggravating copy fees, the most outrageous retaliation attempts, and all the other ridicule-worthy attacks on the public's right to know.
And every year since 2015, as we're about to crown these dubious winners, something new comes to light that makes us consider stopping the presses.
As we were writing up this year's faux awards, news broke that officials from the National Archives and Records Administration had to lug away boxes upon boxes of Trump administration records from Mar-a-Lago, President Trump's private resort. At best, it was an inappropriate move; at worst, a potential violation of laws governing the retention of presidential records and the handling of classified materials. And while Politico had reported that when Trump was still in the White House, he liked to tear up documents, we also just learned from journalist Maggie Haberman's new book that staff claimed to find toilets clogged up with paper scraps, which were potentially torn-up government records. Trump has dismissed the allegations, of course.€
As the Russia-Ukraine war enters its third week, much of the world is using digital technologies to watch it unfold. Behind the physical soldiers in uniform, there are unseen digital algorithms at work, from artificial intelligence to the movement of money, including cryptocurrency, or “[cryptocurrency].”
Heat pumps aren’t the only commodity we might produce this time around. Europe is also apparently short of insulation, and America has spare productive capacity—load ships full of the pink stuff, and let Britons pack their attics so that when November rolls around next year (and November will roll around) the old boiler in the basement won’t have to work so hard while it waits to be replaced by a modern heat pump.
For an oligarch looking to dodge American sanctions, converting wealth into [cryptocurrency] would ideally be a means, not an end. It is not possible to buy most everyday items or financial assets directly with cryptocurrencies. “Ultimately what they really need to do is get access to some form of fiat currency, which becomes more challenging,” said Christopher Wray, the director of the FBI, in a United States Senate hearing on the Russian invasion on March 10th.
To convert back into fiat currency requires interacting with an exchange, which would act as the interface between traditional banks which operate in sovereign money, like the dollar, and [cryptocurrency]. As [cryptocurrency]-exchanges have grown bigger and more important, many have become regulated. Some of the biggest are publicly listed. Most have a presence in America and Europe. This poses two problems for would-be sanctions-dodgers.
As the Biden administration falls woefully behind on its pledges to donate Covid vaccines to the world, on Wednesday, the U.S. House slashed $5 billion for the global pandemic response from an omnibus spending bill. The cut to Covid funds underscores the capriciousness of the U.S. government’s promises, and lends credence to public health activists who argue that countries in the Global South cannot rely on the pledges of wealthy nations, and should be given the information they need to manufacture vaccines€ themselves.
Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has triggered a literal hunt by Global North nations for his and his cronies’ ill-gotten financial assets. It has pushed USAID to announce a new global anti-corruption program aimed at expanding the capacity of investigative journalists and civil society to pursue reforms, and sift through big data dumps that are increasingly a critical source of the financial flows and evidence both sanctions officials and bank regulators need.
Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) has introduced, and several other congressional Democrats have co-sponsored, a bill to curb big petroleum companies engaged in profiteering.
To achieve Russia’s isolation, Mr. Fedorov, a former tech entrepreneur, used a mix of social media, cryptocurrencies and other digital tools. On Twitter and other social media, he pressured Apple, Google, Netflix, Intel, PayPal and others to stop doing business in Russia. He helped form a group of volunteer hackers to wreak havoc on Russian websites and online services. His ministry also set up a cryptocurrency fund that has raised more than $60 million for the Ukrainian military.
The work has made Mr. Fedorov one of Mr. Zelensky’s most visible lieutenants, deploying technology and finance as modern weapons of war. In effect, Mr. Fedorov is creating a new playbook for military conflicts that shows how an outgunned country can use the internet, crypto, digital activism and frequent posts on Twitter to help undercut a foreign aggressor.
The head of Instagram, Adam Mosseri, said in a tweet that “This decision will cut 80 million in Russia off from one another, and from the rest of the world as ~80% of people in Russia follow an Instagram account outside their country. This is wrong.”
"Facebook, by its own admission saw Instagram as a threat that could potentially siphon business away from Facebook," Nadler said during the hearing on Wednesday.
"So rather than compete with it, Facebook bought it. This is exactly the type of anti-competitive acquisition the antitrust laws were designed to prevent," Nadler added.
Facebook bought Instagram for $1 billion in 2012, a shocking sum at that time for a company with 13 employees,
On 11 March, the NPC withdrew its invitation for Pavlovsky to address the club in Canberra. The acting Ukrainian envoy, Volodymyr Shalkivskyi, had spoken at the club on 10 March.
In order to justify the cancellation, the NPC claimed the invitations to both diplomats were issued "at a different stage in the conflict in Ukraine before allegations of war crimes and bombing of civilian targets".
In saying this, the NPC made it clear that it had already passed judgment on these allegations and decided that they are true, which is a remarkable decision to take.
Papers found on the American reporter's body identified him as 50-year-old video documentary shooter Brent Renaud, of New York.
A New York Times identity card was among the papers, leading to reports he worked for the paper, but the US daily said he was not working for it at the time of his death.
Saudi Arabia on Saturday executed 81 people convicted of crimes ranging from killings to belonging to militant groups, the largest known mass execution carried out in the kingdom in its modern history.
This was 1974 when Leary was in Folsom prison in northeastern California, after convictions for a number of marijuana busts plus time for his jailbreak.
It’s not entirely fresh news that the late Timothy Leary was a squealer and a snitch to the FBI. The snitching was well known at the time. The FBI was eager to leak the fact that Leary, high priest of LSD and potentate of the counterculture, was singing about his former associates.
Mitch McConnell, the GOP Senate leader, doesn’t have a problem with billionaires. He’s spent his entire political career helping billionaires make more billions. But Mitch McConnell does have a problem with one particular fabulously rich figure.
Over the years, Livejournal has become more commercial and has been less associated with my community values. I never left during the mass exoduses around TOS changes because while I saw things changing, the worst terms seemed in response to government regulation rather than the choices of the company. I know that if I were to look into US laws, I'd find several that I object to as well.
TorGuard has settled a copyright infringement lawsuit filed by several movie companies last year. The VPN provider stood accused of failing to take action against subscribers who were pirating films. As part of the settlement, TorGuard agrees to block BitTorrent traffic on U.S. servers; however, it stresses that user privacy is in no way affected by this decision.
