GNU/Linux

• Linux Made Simple ☛ Linux Weekly Roundup #183

  Welcome to this week’s Linux weekly Roundup.

  We had a relatively lovely week in the world of Linux releases, with Kali Linux 2022.2, Peppermint OS 5-22-22 and openSUSE 15.4-rc.

  Inkscape 1.2 has also been released this week.

• Server

  • Silicon Angle ☛ The Kubernetes ecosystem hits its inflection point

    With the Cloud Native Computing Foundation’s KubeCon CloudNativeCon Europe 2022 last week in València, Spain, the Kubernetes world came roaring back to life after a lackluster conference in Los Angeles last fall – in spite of a rigorous conference-wide mask mandate.

    The general feeling at the conference was that the Kubernetes ecosystem is reaching an inflection point. Work on the core Kubernetes platform itself is slowing, as it has reached a level of maturity – while rapid innovation continues unabated across the broader Kubernetes landscape.

    [...]

    The shift is subtle, but noticeable: There is less of a concern for the software infrastructure and a greater focus on the applications that run on that infrastructure – deploying, managing and securing them.

    Kubernetes may not quite be part of the background noise of information technology the way Linux and TCP/IP before it have become, but it’s well on its way. There remain a few missing pieces, and other projects are still rough around the edges, but Kubernetes – and cloud-native computing in general – are here to stay.

• Audiocasts/Shows

  • Going Linux #424 · Listener Feedback

    We have feedback on Deepin concerns, information about UbuntuDDE, LinuxFX, NxOS, and the application Flameshot. Bill breaks KDE Neon and Ambrose is annointed ‘Engineer Minion’.

  • Video ☛ Why Do I Use Linux Instead Of BSD? – Invidious

    A question that I often get asked is “Why don’t you use BSD?” The answer to this question is rather simple, but I wanted to ramble a bit on some of the reasons that I think people “assume” are my reason why I choose Linux over BSD.

  • Video ☛ Brodie Robertson: I’ve Finally Made 1,000 Videos: Content Changes Are Coming

    I have no idea how it’s happened but I’ve finally made 1,000 videos and that’s kind of crazy, it’s only been 3 years but it feels like it’s been so much longer and so much less at the same time.

• Kernel Space

  • 9to5Linux ☛ Linux Kernel 5.18 Officially Released, This Is What’s New

    Highlights of Linux kernel 5.18 include the switch to the C11 compiler standard, support for “user events” in the tracing system, support for AMD’s “host system management port” function, support for 64-bit integrity checksums on NVMe devices, support for the Intel’s “hardware feedback interface” feature, indirect branch tracking support for the x86 architecture, as well as better process scheduling performance on AMD Zen CPUs.

  • Linux 5.18

    o unexpected nasty surprises this last week, so here we go with the
    5.18 release right on schedule.
    
    That obviously means that the merge window for 5.19 will open
    tomorrow, and I already have a few pull requests pending. Thank you
    everybody. I'd still like people to run boring old plain 5.18 just to
    check, before we start with the excitement of all the new features for
    the merge window.
    
    The full shortlog for the last week is below, and nothing really odd
    stands out. The diffstat looks a bit funny - unusually we have parsic
    architecture patches being a big part of it due to some last-minute
    cache flushing fixes, but that is probably more indicative of
    everything else being pretty small.
    
    So outside of the parisc fixes, there's random driver updates
    (mellanox mlx5 stands out, again likely because everything else is
    small), some other minor architecture fixes, some core networking, and
    some tooling stuff. And random small noise. People who really care for
    the details please just scroll down..
    
                    Linus
    

  • LWN ☛ The 5.18 kernel has been released [LWN.net]

    Linus has released the 5.18 kernel. “No unexpected nasty surprises this last week, so here we go with the 5.18 release right on schedule.” Some of the headline changes in this release include the DAMOS memory-management interface, a number of random-number-generator improvements, the Intel software-defined silicon driver, strict memcpy() bounds checking, a switch to the C11 standard, and more. Also, the Reiserfs filesystem has been deprecated and the last vestiges of a.out support have been removed. See the LWN merge-window summaries (part 1, part 1) and the KernelNewbies 5.18 page for more details.

  • OMG Ubuntu ☛ Linux Kernel 5.18 Released, This is What’s New

    Ahoy, a brand new Linux kernel release is now available to download.

    Linus Torvalds, creator of Linux, announced the release of Linux 5.18 in a short email to the Linux Kernel Mailing List, writing: “No unexpected nasty surprises this last week, so here we go with the 5.18 release right on schedule”.

    Ahh, I do approve of punctuality, monsieur Torvalds. Predictability and schedule makes writing these blog posts much easier—Wait, I’m lying: I always leave these posts until the last minute.

    What’s new? Let’s find out together!

  • Hackaday ☛ Hack Another ELF On The Stack | Hackaday

    [dropbear] recently found herself in a pickle. Dumping some data out of an Android app at a specific point for reverse engineering purposes. While it worked great in the simulator, it was painfully slow on hardware via lldb. The solution was to write a patch and apply it to the ELF file.

    Writing the AArch64 assembly to dump the buffer is relatively trivial, but adding it to the existing ELF and repackaging it into a new APK leads to strange errors. The relative offsets into .rodata are now all wrong. For those who don’t routinely interface with the format of ELF files, we have a fantastic resource to take you into the dark depths. But the quick summary version is that sections contain various resources, and you find parts of those resources by relative offsets. The program header describes what type of resources each section contains.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Video ☛ How to install Krita on Debian 11 – Invidious

    In this video, we are looking at how to install Krita on Debian 11.

  • Linux Made Simple ☛ How to install Mine-imator 1.2.8 on a Chromebook

    Today we are looking at how to install Mine-imator 1.2.8 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.

  • ID Root ☛ How To Install MPV Media Player on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS – idroot

    In this tutorial, we will show you how to install MPV Media Player on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, MPV is a free and open-source media player. MPV brings a command-line-based media player, it does not contain the GUI but a small menu bar that contains all the options to control the media file. It supports operating systems like Windows, macOS, and Linux distributions.

    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 MPV-free and open-source media player on Ubuntu 22.04 (Jammy Jellyfish). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 22.04 and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint, Elementary OS, Pop!_OS, and more as well.

  • TechRepublic ☛ [Older] How to share directories to your LAN From Ubuntu Desktop 22.04

    Ubuntu 22.04 (Jammy Jellyfish) has arrived, and it offers plenty of exciting new features that are sure to win over hardcore Linux users as well as those new to the world of open source. As usual, the developers of Ubuntu have gone out of their way to make everything not only “just work” but do so with ease.

  • How to Securely Delete Files in Linux

    When you delete a file on your computer, the file is removed by the system, but it isn’t permanently deleted. You can usually recover deleted files using file recovery tools.

    If you have files containing sensitive information, you can delete these files using a more secure method so they can’t be recovered and viewed. We’ll show you a few ways to do this in Linux.

    If you want to know how to securely delete files in Linux, follow our guide below.

  • How to show ink levels of your printer in Linux – Real Linux User

    Linux continues to evolve and support for internal and external devices gets better and better. There was a time when it was a real challenge to get your equipment to work properly under Linux, but those days are really gone. Linux recognizes so much out-of-the-box that you no longer have to worry that, for example, your printer will not work. But there are always minor glitches that you should expect, or at least be aware of. One of these things is when you use your printer for a while you probably want to know if your ink levels are still on a sufficient level to see if you consider ordering new ink cartridges. Of course not all printers are technically capable of giving information about ink levels, but for those who can, most of the time the Linux driver will not give you any information about it. But there is a solution. In this article I will explain how to show the ink levels for your printer in Linux.

  • How To Turn Ubuntu 22.04 into Kubuntu

    This tutorial will explain how you can turn Ubuntu 22.04 with GNOME Desktop into Kubuntu with KDE Plasma Desktop. This will not remove the original GNOME, but we simply install Plasma Desktop on top of the system so we will have two different desktop environments as the result. Follow it carefully and have a friendly computing with Kubuntu!

• Desktop Environments/WMs

  • Linuxiac ☛ GNOME vs KDE: Which Linux Desktop Environment to Choose

    This article introduces new Linux users to the advantages and disadvantages of the two most popular desktop environments in the Linux world, GNOME and KDE.

    One of the first things any new Linux user learns is that the Linux desktop environment can look in various ways. The second thing a user discovers is that in Linux, you can have multiple entirely independent working environments.

    This is where the confusion begins, and the first words that appear on the horizon are usually GNOME and KDE. For a range of reasons, these two desktop environments are the most popular in the Linux world, and before we go any further, we’ll provide our readers with a quick historical overview.

Distributions and Operating Systems

• Debian Family

  • Ian Jackson & Debian reject mediation

    Most of the attention on DebConf19 has been about the intern scandals.

    Behind the scenes, the anti-harassment gulag organized a Birds of a Feather (BoF) meeting to talk about their sinister work. There is a video available. This was not long after the blackmailing of Dr Norbert Preining and the death of Lucy Wayland.

    Jackson, a former Debian Project Leader from the UK, comments that he doesn’t like mediation. Could this be a hint about why Debian is now wasting so much money on a SLAPP attack to shut down the Debian Community News?

    In the 45 minute video, nobody presents any alternative to mediation.

• Canonical/Ubuntu Family

  • OMG Ubuntu ☛ Ubuntu 22.10 Makes PipeWire Default

    PipeWire is the default audio server in Ubuntu 22.10.

    The latest daily builds of the development release (which is codenamed ‘Kinetic Kudu’) ship with Pipewire in place of Pulseaudio out of the box, no workarounds required. The last time Ubuntu made made a major change to its audio stack was (fittingly) in the last ‘K’-named release, Ubuntu 9.10 ‘Karmic Koala’.

    Ubuntu trails its distro rivals in adopting this next-gen sound server tech. The roots of PipeWire go back to 2015. The tech was initially conceived as a “PulseAudio for video”, but was later expanded to include audio streams. Fedora adopted the tech by default in 2021, and other desktop Linux distro’s soon followed suit.

    Technically speaking Ubuntu already includes PipeWire. Ubuntu 22.04 LTS ships with both PipeWire and PulseAudio installed on the default image. However, the former stack is only used for video (mainly for Wayland compatability) and the latter remains in charge of audio duties.

• Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

  • Android Central ☛ Android 13 is picking up native support for most braille displays | Android Central

  • Forbes ☛ Google Half-Fixes Broken Google Photos Feature For Millions Of Android Users

  • Android Police ☛ Google has made Wear OS worth believing in again to the people who matter

  • The Best Creative Games for Android 2022 – Townscaper, Levelhead, Minecraft and More – Droid Gamers

  • Make Use Of ☛ How to Uncover the Android 12 Easter Egg

  • Android Central ☛ From the Editor’s Desk: Making sense of the Google Pixel Tablet | Android Central

  • Amazon’s New Fire Tablets Run a Newer Outdated Android Version – Review Geek

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• Programming/Development

  • Search

    This weekend, I finnaly did something that I should have done long ago:
    I implemented text search for my gopher- and gemini-client ncgopher.

  • Sergio Talens-Oliag: New Blog

    Welcome to my new Blog for Technical Stuff.

    For a long time I was planning to start publishing technical articles again but to do it I wanted to replace my old blog based on ikiwiki by something more modern.

    I’ve used Jekyll with GitLab Pages to build the Intranet of the ITI and to generate internal documentation sites on Agile Content, but, as happened with ikiwiki, I felt that things were kind of slow and not as easy to maintain as I would like.

    So on Kyso (the Company I work for right now) I switched to Hugo as the Static Site Generator (I still use GitLab Pages to automate the deployment, though), but the contents are written using the Markdown format, while my personal preference is the Asciidoc format.

Leftovers

• Science

  • Technology for the Ageing

    Getting old is a bitch. I have three ageing parents/in-laws over 80 (one fully independent, one pretty much functional, one with dementia). Can technology help them stay in touch with the world, or make their lives easier? I do not want to be ageist (and no spring chicken myself), but in my experience, technology is completely incompatible with the older crowd.

    I am talking about the pre-internet generation. A 90+ -year-old today was brought up in the age of horse carriages. The boomers of today will probably have an easier time, but some physical limitations will still make it hard.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • The science says that ZeroWater is not worth the money or hype. Brita is among the best countertop models. – BaronHK’s Rants

    I came across a video where a man tried all of the standard cartridges for common countertop water filter systems (many of which are also meant to go directly into the fridge), which are gravity-fed.

    Now, some people swear up and down by a particular brand, and one particular brand to stay away from is ZeroWater.

    ZeroWater sells incredibly expensive replacement filter cartridges.

    [...]

    Well, my family was among the first wave of Classic Brita pitcher owners back in the 90s when owning one became one of the things you did as part of the middle class in the United States.

    Today you can get them everywhere and even the standard cartridges have improved greatly.

    Right now I am using standard Brita cartridges. They’re cheap, they’re effective at what you can expect with a countertop system, and the lab results from the video back that up.

    In fact, out of a 100 point rating scale, where 100 is best performing and 0 is absolute garbage, the video rates Aqua Crest at 88, Brita’s standard cartridge at 83, Pur’s standard cartridge at 76, and ZeroWater’s system at just 71.

    Does ZeroWater have an effect on your tap water? Sure. Provided you don’t get one of the manufacturing defects that seem quite common and it actually works, and assuming you don’t get water that tastes like it came out of a fish tank, like some people say they do.

    But for a system that’s at least more than 400% more expensive than Standard Brita to keep going once you own the pitcher, it seems like you should really question why you would invest your money into a system that does less when it’s important, does more where you don’t want it to, and is plagued by quality control problems.

    I have _never_ had a defective Brita filter that started giving me fish water 2 weeks in. I can tell you that much.

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Should women worry about data from their period-tracking app being used against them? [Ed: They should be worried about their IQ if they enter such data into a so-called 'smart' 'phone']

      It’s estimated that millions of people in the U.S. use period-tracking apps to plan ahead, track when they are ovulating, and monitor other health effects. The apps can help signal when a period is late.

• Defence/Aggression

  • A wrong message at a right time?

    At a time when the anti-Gota protests is acquiring the characteristics of a Greek tragedy, for the Canadian Parliament to remind this nation of alleged ‘war crimes’ has gone mostly unnoticed. While sections of the Tamil Diaspora is as euphoric as ever, the Foreign Ministry, by issuing a strongly-worded rebuttal instantaneously, has called the shots – indicating as to whose views between those of President Gotabaya Rajapaksa and Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe, prevail in matters non-economic.

    [...]

    The fact that the Canadian House of Commons’ motion coincided with the 13th anniversary of the bloody end to the ethnic war in May 2009 should show that there is more to it than meets the eye. Like many European nations, Canada is inherently touchy about the 20th century version of human rights and its adoption to the 21st century.

• Finance

  • Strange fluctuations in egg prices in the United States.

    Strange fluctuations are happening in egg prices in the United States.

    I suppose you could call it one part of the larger disaster of rising grocery prices, but since January, the price of eggs has more than doubled here.

    In fact, while brown eggs are usually a lot more expensive (there is no difference in nutrient profile or protein quality….it’s literally just different kinds of hens and feed that produce different colors, and it’s a matter of regional preference), the disruption in the white egg market has left the situation inverted at Walmart.

    At my local Walmart, you can buy a dozen brown eggs, Great Value, for $1.67, which is 13.9 cents each, but at the same time, a dozen white eggs are now 21.6 cents each, or $2.59.

  • Walmart has made sure that the people who suffer from the chicken shortage are the people who need to “save money and live better”.

    Walmart has made sure that the people who suffer from the chicken shortage are the people who need to “save money and live better”.

    Going along with my previous post about egg prices, Walmart seems to have told their suppliers to stop giving them the chicken they normally sell for $2.69 and $2.99 a pound (thighs and breasts) and start only packaging the expensive national brands that cost $7-9 a pound instead.

    So if you get your chicken at Walmart, the implication is that it’s going to be a major drag on your grocery bill.

    That’s why when I got my deep freezer this year, I hurried up and included well over 200 pounds of chicken that I bought in those enormous family packs (on sale) from Jewel Osco before the 5% quarter on grocery stores expired on my Discover card for the year.

    It’s a good thing too, because Walmart’s chicken section has been pretty wiped out for months now, and unless you want the expensive national brand, you’re probably all out of luck unless you go in there every day and toss a pack or two of store brand, if you can even find it.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • Neocities: the 90′s Aesthetic as a Symbol?

    At the moment, the biggest mystery I have, is an artistic one. Many Neocities sites, including sites owned by teenagers (born after the 90′s, of course) are stylized like websites from the 90′s, or Geocities sites in particular. Some websites contain things like screenshots of applications such as Windows Live Messenger or retro-inspired design elements like Windows 9X style, “fake 3D” borders around elements, or even have a fake Windows XP taskbar at the bottom. However, in most cases, the content has nothing to do with 90′s computing, 90′s music, etc’: most of the websites I looked at are personal websites (diaries or blogs of some sort), some have a social element to them (for example, a guestbook and links to websites of real-life friends) and some showcase an art portfolio.

GNU/Linux

• Desktop/Laptop

  • WCCF Tech ☛ HP designing AMD-based Dev One laptop loaded with Linux & powered by Pop!_OS

    HP surprises Linux users by revealing its AMD-powered Dev One laptop that utilizes the open-source Pop!_OS operating system by System76.

    System76 & HP bring Linux developers the Dev One, A Pop!_OS & AMD-Powered laptop to easier control their workspaces on the go

  • OMG Ubuntu ☛ HP Team Up With System76 for New Linux Laptop

    HP is launching a Linux laptop pre-loaded with Pop!_OS, the Ubuntu-based distro created by System76.

    The collaboration, which was quietly revealed by System76 CEO Carl Richell on Twitter, is a pretty major one. It is the first time System76 has partnered with another computer company to ship their OS. It’s also the first time (to my knowledge) that a HP Linux laptop will ship with something other than vanilla Ubuntu.

    Specs for the 14-inch HP Dev One seem pretty sweet, too.

  • Linux Gizmos ☛ Minisforum HX90G Mini-PC powered by AMD Ryzen 9 5900HX CPU and discrete AMD GPU

    Minisforum has unveiled their latest Mini PC which is based on the AMD Ryzen 9 5900HX. The HX90G is also equipped with the Radeon RX 6650M discrete GPU design and dual SO-DIMM DDR4 slots for a total storage capacity of 64GB.

    The base clock for the Ryzen 9 5900HX is 3.3GHz and features eight cores and sixteen threads. Additionally, Minisforum has also mentioned they will release two additional configurations of the HX90G that will implement the AMD Ryzen 9 6900HX processor (w/ Radeon RX 6650M) and the Intel Core i9- 12900H (w/ AMD Discrete GPU).

• Applications

  • Ubuntu Pit ☛ Top 15 Best Linux PDF Viewers and Readers in 2022

    Nowadays, we are greatly dependent on online platforms for educational, working jobs, business, communication, and other purposes. Right? And the usage of portable documentary format files, better known as PDF files, is increasing day by day. So, all of us need to have the best quality pdf reader. But, all the pdf viewers are not all the same. And features are also different from different applications. Which one will be perfect for you? The big question it is! Agree? Most of the Linux distributions also come with pdf viewers, but they have some limitations and are not high functioning, unfortunately. That is why we are here to address you with the best Linux PDF viewers.

  • Top 15 Linux Performance Monitoring Tools – LinuxWizardry

    There are several performance monitoring tools in Linux that allow you to monitor resource usage on the system. These tools can aid in debugging Linux System Performance issues and troubleshooting them.

    In this article, we will discuss some of the best tools for monitoring Linux performance. The commands listed below are available in all Linux distributions and some of them are installed by default on the system.

  • Hypnotix – SparkyLinux

    Hypnotix is an IPTV streaming application with support for live TV, movies and series. It can support multiple IPTV providers of the following types: M3U URL, Xtream API, Local M3U playlist. Hypnotix does not provide content or TV channels, it is a player application which streams from IPTV providers. By default, Hypnotix is configured with one IPTV provider called Free-TV.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • ByteXD ☛ How to Curve Text in Inkscape – ByteXD

    Curving text is widely spread when composing graphical pieces, because the curves are more comfortable to the eye than the sharp shape. Nonetheless, it makes the graphic more dynamic and interesting.

  • How to Install Laravel 9 on Ubuntu 22.04

  • Linux Capable ☛ How to Install KDE Plasma Desktop on CentOS 9 Stream

  • ByteXD ☛ How to Outline Text in Inkscape

    Inkscape is a great tool when you are creating typographic artwork, but there is a lot to think about when you are dealing with typographic elements.

    In this article will demonstrate how to add an outline to your text in Inkscape.

  • TecAdmin ☛ How to Install Sublime Text 4 on Ubuntu 22.04

    Sublime is a powerful and widely used text and application source code editor. It supports the syntax of most popular programming languages. Sublime also provides a large number of third-party extensions that provides more features to developers.

    You may also like => Installing Visual Studio Code on Ubuntu 20.04

    Sublime 4 is the latest available version for the developers. In this tutorial, you will learn to install Sublime text 4 on the Ubuntu 22.04 systems.

  • The New Stack ☛ How to Create and Use Container Volumes within Portainer

    Portainer has become my favorite tool for managing containers. With this web-based GUI, you can do just about anything you need to work with your Docker containers. It’s powerful, flexible, and very user-friendly.

    With Portainer, you can manage nearly any aspect of your containers, from building and deploying single apps/services and even full-stack applications. Another area that Portainer really shines in is the creation and usage of volumes.

    What are Docker volumes? Simple. Imagine you deploy an application or service that stores data. If you deploy the container without a volume, the data will be stored within the container, and accessing that data from another container might be challenging. Even worse, should something happen to that container, the data it housed could get hosed.

  • H2S Media ☛ How to check internet speed using command in Ubuntu Linux – Linux Shout

    Let’s learn the steps to check the internet speed on your Ubuntu using the command terminal without using the browser.

    The bandwidth describes a frequency range in which electrical signal transmission is possible. The greater the difference between the lower and upper frequencies, the greater the bandwidth, and the more information can be transmitted simultaneously. On the Internet or with a DSL connection, a high bandwidth stands for fast surfing. Classic ADSL connections (for example, come to 16 Mbit/s, with VDSL and fiber optics 100 Mbit/s and more are easily achieved. For most applications on the Internet, however, the “slower” bandwidths of 16 Mbit/s are also sufficient.

    However, there are many web tools that we can easily use to check the internet speed. But what if you are using a Linux server with only a command-line interface. Then here is the solution.

• Games

  • Google Summer of Code 2022 – please welcome our students!

    A few days ago, Google announced the list of students accepted for this year’s Google Summer of Code.

    We are very proud to welcome 4 students this year who will be working on various parts of the project during the upcoming months.

Distributions and Operating Systems

• Everfree’s ARMFerno – My Unholy Battle With a Rock64

  I’ve got this rock64, which is an aarch64 board comparable to a Raspberry Pi 3 B+ with 4 gigs of ram. For years I’ve wanted to put a distribution on here that doesn’t have a premade image available, mainly because out of all the options on that page I don’t actually like any of them. Well, except NetBSD, but NetBSD doesn’t have GPU drivers for it. Problem is, everything I do want to use provides rootfs tarballs and tells you to figure it out. To do that I’ve got to get a Linux kernel, track down the device trees so it knows what hardware it has, and then wrangle u-boot into actually booting the whole thing. I figured that would be the hard part; little did I know the depths that Single Board Computer Hell would reach.

• OS News ☛ My unholy battle with a Rock64 – OSnews

  Unlike x86, ARM is far, far from a standardised platform. The end result of this is that unless you can find tailor-made images specific for your particular ARM board, you’re gonna have to do a lot of manual labour to install an operating system that should work.

• New Releases

  • Peppermint OS Release 5-22-2022 – Peppermint OS

    Thank you to all those folks that have helped and supported our effort to make Peppermint even better. We are happy to announce a release of a 32 bit, and refreshed 64 bit ISO’s

• BSD

  • NetBSD ☛ Announcing Google Summer of Code 2022 projects

    The community bonding period has already started (from May 20) and it will last until June 12. During this time, the contributors are expected to coordinate with their mentors and community.

    This will be immediately followed by the coding period from June 13 to September 4. After which, the contributors are expected to submit their final work, evaluate their mentors, and get evaluated by their mentors as well. Results will be announced on September 20.

• Fedora Family / IBM

  • Ultramarine Linux: Fedora with Pantheon, Budgie, Cutefish and GNOME

    A review of Ultramarine Linux (36) which offers impressive experience with Pantheon, Budgie, Cutefish and GNOME desktop.

• Devices/Embedded

  • CNX Software ☛ Linux hardware video encoding on Amlogic A311D2 processor – CNX Software

    I’ve spent a bit more time with Ubuntu 22.04 on Khadas VIM4 Amogic A311D2 SBC, and while the performance is generally good features like 3D graphics acceleration and hardware video decoding are missing. But I was pleased to see a Linux hardware video encoding section in the Wiki, as it’s not something we often see supported early on. So I’ve given it a try…

• Open Hardware/Modding

  • MQ-2 with Raspberry PI Pico: Gas Sensor Wiring and MicroPython Code

    Detecting air gas comes useful in applications like air quality monitoring, Gas leak alarm and maintaining environmental standards in hospitals. The MQ-2 with Raspberry PI Pico bring this capability to your DIY projects with cheap parts

    In this tutorial, I’m going to show you how to connect the gas sensor MQ-2 with Raspberry PI Pico, coding it with MicroPython.

    WARNING: health and safety are serious topics. Lives and object security should never fully depend on DIY projects until you are a professional in these fields and you adopt all the needed precautions.

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• GNU Projects

  • GNU ☛ parallel @ Savannah: GNU Parallel 20220522 (‘NATO’) released

    GNU Parallel 20220522 (‘NATO’) has been released. It is available for download at: lbry://@GnuParallel:4

• Programming/Development

  • Understanding ViewComponent concepts by building a button

    For the purposes of this post, a component is an encapsulation of a reusable piece of a view template responsible for its rendering. Components can technically be unique, but the core idea is to build common reusable parts and stay away from one-off components. Think buttons, alerts, or icons.

  • Perl / Raku

    • Perl ☛ MooseX::Extreme Needs a New Name

      It’s based on years of experience being the lead designer of the Corinna project and trying to figure out how we can get a version of Moose which is safer and easier to use, including removing a lot of boilerplate.

• Standards/Consortia

  • Unified Patents Launches IETF OPEN

    Unified Patents is pleased to announce OPEN’s IETF Standard Submission Portal. The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is largely responsible for how the internet operates and is vitally important to how various devices use the internet. Users can now search all the submissions related to IETF via full-text or by author and source. The submission portal includes over 86,000 documents that are full-text searchable.

Leftovers

• Hackaday ☛ Sisyphean Ball Race Robot Toils Gracefully, Magnetically

  Aren’t ball races and marble runs fun? Wouldn’t they be so much more enjoyable if you didn’t have to climb back up the ladder each time, as it were, and reset the thing? [Johannes] wrote in to tell us about a wee robot with the Sisyphean task of setting a ball bearing on a simple but fun course, collecting it from the end, and airlifting it back to the start of the track.

• Hackaday ☛ One Solution, Many Problems

  You might think you’re lucky when one of your problems has multiple solutions, and you get to pick and choose, but you’re even luckier when one solution has many problems! This week I stumbled on an old solution in a new place. The project was a fantastic old MIDI guitar build, the Tryndelka by [Aleksandr Goltsov]. And the old solution? Switch matrix diodes.

• Hackaday ☛ A Receive Antenna Switcher With An Espressif Brain

  It’s not uncommon for a radio enthusiast to have multiple antennas for the same radio, so as you might expect it’s also entirely usual to have a bunch of coaxial cables dangling down for fumbling around the back of the rig to swap over.  If that describes your radio experience than you might be interested in the antenna switcher built by [g3gg0], which uses solid-state RF switches controlled by an ESP32 module.

• Hackaday ☛ HP-200LX Runs Website Like It’s The 90s

  The HP-200LX palmtop was a fascinating machine for its time, and [Terrence Vergauwen] proves that its time is not yet over, given that one is responsible for serving up the website for Palmtop Tube, a website and YouTube channel dedicated to vintage palmtops.

• Science

  • Hackaday ☛ Voyager 1 Talks Some Nonsense, But Is Still Working

    The Voyager 1 interplanetary probe was launched in 1977 and has now reached interstellar space where it is the furthest-traveled man-made object. It’s hugely exceeded its original mission and continues to return valuable scientific data, but there’s an apparent fault which is leaving its controllers perplexed. Onboard is an attitude control system which keeps the craft’s antennas pointing at Earth, and while it evidently still works (as we’re still in touch with the probe) and other systems are fine, it’s started returning incomprehensible data. Apparently it’s developed a habit of reporting random data, or states the antenna can’t possibly be in.

  • How Did the Bar Code Infiltrate the World?

    very product you purchase in a store has one. Every book you borrow from a library has one. Every airline ticket has one. Yet it is something you rarely think about: the bar code. The bar code is a simple printed or displayed code made up of a varying array of thick and thin black bars, but it is one of the most powerful little pieces of technology ever invented.

  • AAAS ☛ A bioactive phlebovirus-like envelope protein in a hookworm endogenous virus

• Hardware

  • Hackaday ☛ The Thin-Film Flexible 6502

    While our attention is mostly directed towards ever smaller-integrated silicon circuits providing faster and faster computing, there’s another area of integrated electronics that operates at a much lower speed which we should be following. Thin-film flexible circuitry will provide novel ways to place electronics where a bulky or expensive circuit board with traditional components might be too expensive or inappropriate, and Wikichip is here to remind us of a Leuven university team who’ve created what is claimed to be the fastest thin-film flexible microprocessor yet. Some of you might find it familiar, it’s our old friend the 6502.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Orac ☛ Dr. Richard Amerling of AAPS goes full Godwin on COVID-19

    Every so often, I come across a quack unfamiliar to me, one whom I’ve never heard of before. So it was yesterday when my email inbox was contaminated with a missive promoting an article by Dr. Richard Amerling. Why did I get such a missive? Simple. I’m on a lot of email lists, which I monitor as one strategy to keep my finger on the pulse of quackery, pseudoscience, the antivaccine movement, and conspiracy theories. One such mailing list that I monitor is that of the American Association of Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS), of which Dr. Amerling is apparently a member, and it sent me a reference to an article by him, which he also had Tweeted out:

• Proprietary

  • Searching “Lagrange Gemini” in the iOS App Store

  • Help Net Security ☛ VMware issues critical fixes, CISA orders federal agencies to act immediately (CVE-2022-22972)

    VMware has released patches for a privately reported critical vulnerability (CVE-2022-22972) in VMware’s Workspace ONE Access, VMware Identity Manager (vIDM), vRealize Lifecycle Manager, vRealize Automation, and VMware Cloud Foundation products, and is urging administrators to patch or mitigate immediately, because “the ramifications of this vulnerability are serious.”

• Security

  • Hackaday ☛ TurtleAuth DIY Security Token Gets (Re)designed For Durable, Everyday Use

    [Samuel]’s first foray into making DIY hardware authentication tokens was a great success, but he soon realized that a device intended for everyday carry and use has a few different problems to solve, compared to a PCB that lives and works on a workbench. This led to TurtleAuth 2.1, redesigned for everyday use and lucky for us all, he goes into detail on all the challenges and solutions he faced.

  • Medium ☛ (Free) Ethical Hacking courses in 2022

    Ethical hacking is also known as white hat hacking or penetration testing. Its a process followed by a hacker to exploit a vulnerability inside a system and that system could be computers such as Windows, Linux, macOS, or maybe websites.

    Unlike malicious hackers, who are typically motivated by financial gain, ethical hackers aim to help companies (and society as a whole) keep their data safe…

• Defence/Aggression

  • Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | The Buffalo Massacre, Banning Books, and Systemic Racism

    Ten people were slaughtered in Buffalo last Saturday, killed at a supermarket in the heart of the Black community. The gunman: an 18-year-old self-professed white supremacist armed with a legally-purchased Bushmaster AR-15-style semiautomatic rifle. His goal, based on a rambling, poisonous 180-page document he posted online, was to “kill as many Blacks as possible.” Of the 13 victims (including three who were injured), eleven were African American. The killer live-streamed the massacre on the social media video website Twitch. While the Amazon-owned site pulled down the gruesome video within minutes, it was immediately posted then accessed by millions on other internet platforms.

  • Scheerpost ☛ Peace Advocates Sound Warnings as Progressive Lawmakers Go All-In for $40 Billion Ukraine War Packages

    The U.S. Senate on Thursday overwhelmingly voted to approve $40 billion in emergency military and humanitarian aid for Ukraine amid both Russia’s ongoing invasion and warnings from peace advocates that prolonging the war makes the world a more dangerous, not safer, place.

  • Gannett ☛ What’s the best way to donate to Ukraine? Give with your heart, but use your head, experts say

    Dozens of charity organizations are trying to help more than 6 million refugees who have left war-torn Ukraine since Russia invaded – and 6.5 million who are believed to be displaced inside Ukraine.

    While the United States and NATO members give military assistance and other funding, charities from Ukraine, the USA and international sources provide humanitarian aid, from medicine to meals to mental health counseling.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • TruthOut ☛ The 2022 Elections Are Fraught With Undisclosed Dark Money

  • TruthOut ☛ Judge Blocks Biden from Ending Title 42 in “Arbitrary, Racist” Ruling

  • FAIR ☛ New York’s Chait Quietly Defended Charter Program That Benefited His Spouse’s Employer

    It’s getting harder and harder for New York magazine writer Jonathan Chait to argue he’s exempt from ethical disclosure norms when writing about education.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation

    • Scheerpost ☛ “The Typhoid Mary of Disinformation”: Nicolle Wallace. Nobody Spreads it More Relentlessly.

      From her days as Bush/Cheney propagandist, to her stint on The View, to her role as beloved-by-Democrats MSNBC host, Wallace has perfected the art of sociopathic lying.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • Scheerpost ☛ The Future of Press Freedom Depends on Assange Case

    The world awaits the decision of U.K. Home Secretary Priti Patel in the case of Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks publisher who has been a political prisoner in London since his arrest at the Ecuadorian Embassy in 2019. Last month, a British court sent the case to Patel, who is now charged with deciding whether to hand Assange to the United States – a decision that entails a judgment about whether the U.S. will kill him. Dozens of international human rights and press freedom groups – including Amnesty International, the ACLU, Human Rights Watch, and Reporters Without Borders – have opposed extradition as a “grave threat to press freedom both in the United States and abroad.”

  • Scheerpost ☛ ‘We Were Expecting This,’ Says Family After Israel Says No Criminal Probe Into Killing of Shireen Abu Akleh

    Israel will not pursue a criminal investigation into the killing of Palestinian American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, whose death earlier this month sparked global outrage.

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | Overturning Roe Will Harm Women Across the World

    A leaked draft of a United States Supreme Court (SCOTUS) opinion that would overturn Roe v Wade, a landmark 1973 decision that gave women the constitutional right to abortion, recently put abortion rights once again on the global agenda.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • A Forward-Looking Statement: Impending Hiatus

    Lagrange has been progressing quite briskly since last fall, with versions 1.7–1.13 released between September 2021 and May 2022. I am always hesitant to make predictions about what exactly will happen with a given project in the future, but when it comes to the second half of 2022, there is certainly going to be a change of pace.

    [...]

    I have no intention of stepping away from Gemini or Lagrange, and will continue reading daily and maybe even writing occasionally. Lagrange patch releases continue to be possible as the process is mostly handled via scripts, but larger-scale feature work will have to be postponed for a few months.

• Monopolies

  • Patents

    • FOSS Patents: IP Bridge wins 4G patent injunction against Ford’s German subsidiary: Munich I Regional Court announced bench ruling at end of yesterday’s trial

      In the second half of 2020, Daimler was slapped with four German standard-essential patent (SEP) injunctions with only 11 weeks between the first and the fourth. Three of them came down in Munich, and one in Mannheim. Quinn Emanuel–a firm that boasts a sky-high ratio of trial wins on its website–unsuccessfully represented Daimler in each of those cases.

      Yesterday (Thursday, May 19), the Landgericht München I (Munich I Regional Court) entered the latest SEP injunction against a maker of connected cars. A few hours after the OPPO v. Nokia 5G trial I’ve already reported on, the same division of the court–the Seventh Civil Chamber under Presiding Judge Dr. Matthias Zigann (and again with Judge Dr. Hubertus Schacht as the rapporteur and Judge Kuttenkeuler as the second side judge)–resumed the proceedings in case no. 7 O 9572/21, Godo Kaisha IP Bridge 1 v. Ford-Werke GmbH. Japan’s national patent licensing firm IP Bridge won a Germany-wide permanent (though appealable) injunction against the German subsidiary of Ford Motor Company over a patent found essential to the 4G (LTE) standard, EP2294737 on “control channel signalling for triggering the independent transmission of a channel quality indicator.” The patent-in-suit was originally obtained by Japanese electronics maker Panasonic, which declared it essential to 4G. The same patent has previously been asserted against smartphone makers OPPO and HTC, and various other defendants.

      As I’ll mention again further below, the decision has ramifications beyond these two parties: the fact that Ford didn’t make the Avanci patent pool a counteroffer was fatal to Ford’s FRAND defense.

      I saw the IP Bridge v. Ford case on a list of hearings and trials right outside Judge Zigann’s courtroom (501, for those who’ve been to the Munich court and/or like the iconic Levi’s jeans). I later asked the court what happened, and received a highly informative answer today.

    • Unified Succeeds in RPI Decisions

      For the past decade, across more than 300 proceedings, Unified Patents has won every real party-in-interest (RPI) challenge—whether at institution, on final written decision, or before the Federal Circuit.

  • Software Patents

    • Prior art found on Consumeron patent

      Unified is pleased to announce prior art has been found on U.S. Patent 10,115,067, owned by Consumeron, LLC, an NPE. The ’067 patent relates to a method for remote acquisition and delivery of goods involving a server in communication with a customer’s computer through a user interface via the Internet. The patent had been asserted against MapleBear Inc. d/b/a Instacart.

    • K. Mizra patent likely invalid

      On May 18, 2022, the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) instituted trial on all challenged claims in an IPR filed by Unified against U.S. Patent 7,394,423, owned and asserted by K. Mizra LLC. The ‘423 patent generally relates to a device for initiating and handling an emergency IP request using an IP enabled device having GPS capability and had been asserted against General Motors.

    • Jeffrey M. Gross entity Compression Vectors reexamination granted

      On May 17, 2022, just one month after Unified filed an ex parte reexamination, the USPTO granted Unified’s request, finding substantial new questions of patentability on the challenged claims of U.S. Patent 6,731,813. The patent is owned and asserted by Compression Vectors LLC, an NPE and entity of Jeffrey M. Gross. The ’813 patent relates to adjusting frame intervals during compression of a video signal and was previously asserted against Axis Communications AB, Cisco, Hanwha Corp., and Intel. This filing is part of Unified’s ongoing efforts in its SEP Video Codec Zone.

    • DigiMedia Tech patent held invalid

      On May 16, 2022, the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) issued a final written decision in Unified Patents, LLC v. DigiMedia Tech, LLC holding all of the challenged claims of U.S. Patent 7,715,476 unpatentable. Formally owned by Intellectual Ventures but now owned by DigiMedia Tech LLC, an NPE and an IP Investments Group entity, the ‘476 patent is generally related to displaying video images generated by a camera on a display, and more particularly to tracking a head portion of a person image in camera-generated video images. The ‘476 patent has been asserted against Olympus Corp., Fujifilm Holdings, Sakar International, Nikon, JK Imaging, Elite Brands, Panasonic, and Lenovo.

    • InterDigital AV1/VP9 patent opposed in Japan

      On May 16, 2022, Unified Patents filed a Japanese opposition against JP6968024, currently assigned to InterDigital VC Holdings. The ‘024 patent is related to patents that have been designated as essential to SISVEL’s VP9 and AV1 pools.

  • Trademarks

    • Techdirt ☛ Stone Brewing, Sycamore Brewing Reach Settlement

      You will recall that we have been discussing a trademark suit between Sycamore Brewing and Stone Brewing recently. As you can see in images in the post we did about the lawsuit, and then the follow up post on the battle over an injunction requiring Stone Brewing to sticker over the offending branding, it’s pretty clear that this constituted trademark infringement. Part of what made this story noteworthy is that Stone Brewing has, for years, represented itself as a craft brewer ready to take on the big breweries on matters of intellectual property, as though it were some paragon of the industry. Instead, Stone Brewery appears to have turned to both trademark trolling and trademark infringer of smaller breweries.

  • Copyrights

    • Torrent Freak ☛ Records Labels and ISP Seek Summary Judgments in Piracy Lawsuit

      Internet provider Bright House has asked a court for a summary judgment confirming that it’s not liable for the alleged piracy activities of its subscribers. Several major music companies, meanwhile, request the exact opposite. The motions aim to simplify the case before it goes to trial and are crucial to its eventual outcome.