05.25.22

Audiocasts/Shows

• FLOSS Weekly 682: Free and Open P2P Team Chat with Quiet – Holmes Wilson, Quiet

  Holmes Wilson explains to Doc Searls and Katherine Druckman how central servers limit personal freedom, and how you can improve the quality of private P2P team chat and collaboration like Slack and Discord with Quiet, his open source team’s work in progress.

• Video ☛ PipeWire Is Here & Ubuntu 22.10 Knows It!! – Invidious

  It’s taken a while but Ubuntu is finally embracing pipewire for it’s audio stack and dropping pulseaudio, it’s nice to see more distros adopting this and hopefully it’ll lead to big improvements outside of ubuntu.

• Video ☛ My Tier List For Tiling Window Managers – Invidious

  Here is my “tier list” for the various tiling window managers that I have used, which includes : ► awesome ► bspwm ► dwm ► exwm ► herbstluftwm ► i3wm ► leftwm ► qtile ► spectrwm ► stumpwm ► xmonad

• Video ☛ Free and Open Source software licenses explained – Invidious

• Video ☛ Ultramarine Linux 36 overview | A simplified yet powerful Linux experience for all. – Invidious

  In this video, I am going to show an overview of Ultramarine Linux 36 and some of the applications pre-installed.

Applications

• OMG Ubuntu ☛ Paper is a Stylish Note Taking App for Linux – OMG! Ubuntu!

  If you’re seeking out a note taking app for Linux you’ll want to check out Paper.

  Paper is a modern GTK app that pitches itself as a ‘pretty note-taking app for GNOME’ — and it is! Being based around Markdown means the app supports text formatting, adding links, highlighting sections of text, inserting code blocks, and more, out of the box.

  Now, I class myself as more of a casual note taker. I use apps like this to squirrel away ideas I have for future posts, terminal commands I ought to remember, and …Well, keep on top of my He-Man toy collection.

  Basics note taking needs, if you will. I’m not at college doing a degree needing citations, references, calculations, hierarchal sorting, and other ‘advanced’ options. For serious note-taking a more established service, app, and/or platform is best.

  But for everyday needs? Paper’s the ticket.

• The Register UK ☛ Original killer PC spreadsheet Lotus 1-2-3 now runs on Linux natively • The Register

  A long lost native Unix version of the killer PC spreadsheet has not only been rediscovered, but almost unbelievably, it’s been updated to create a native Linux version.

  Lotus 1-2-3 was arguably the single application which made the IBM PC a success, and was launched nearly 40 years ago, on January 26, 1983. The Reg celebrated its 30th anniversary by firing it up in DOSbox, and we mourned when IBM finally killed it.

  It still has admirers today, and one of them is Google bughunter Tavis Ormandy, of Project Zero. Ormandy explains how he ported Lotus 1-2-3 natively to Linux here.

  Ormandy has previously blogged about finding a DOS word-processor to run on Linux.

• HowTo Geek ☛ Plex Finally Has a Linux Desktop Player

  Plex is one of the most popular ways to stream your own media collection, but there hasn’t been an officially-available app for playing all Plex content on Linux — until now.

• Psychonauts 2 May 24 Update Brings Linux and macOS Versions

  Thanks to the update recently released, Psychonauts 2 can now be enjoyed by even more players. The May 24 update brought support for two additional text languages and a couple of bug fixes. The two added languages are Latin American Spanish and Russian, while the fixes are for the stability issues of the Strike City checkpoint at the end of the level.

Instructionals/Technical

• One of the strangest bug I have ever seen on Linux

  Networking starts when you login as root, stops when you log off !

• ID Root ☛ How To Install FFmpeg on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS

  In this tutorial, we will show you how to install FFmpeg on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, FFmpeg is a collection of tools that process audio and video files. It provides its users with various features including the encoding of videos and audios to different formats. Furthermore, users can resize their videos and capture streaming audio or videos. FFmpeg supports cross-platform compatibility with Windows, Linux, Mac OS

  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 FFmpeg 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.

• Linux Made Simple ☛ How to install Funkin V.S. NEO Whitty Full Week on a Chromebook

  Today we are looking at how to install Funkin V.S. NEO Whitty Full Week (fanmade) 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.

• TechRepublic ☛ How to install the Apache Druid real-time analytics database on Ubuntu-based Linux distributions

• H2S Media ☛ Install Jitsi Meet on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy Linux – Linux Shout

  Tutorial to learn the steps for installing Jitsi meet on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy JellyFish Server for setting up your own free and open-source video conferencing service solution.

• ID Root ☛ How To Install GIMP on Fedora 36 – idroot

  In this tutorial, we will show you how to install GIMP on Fedora 36. For those of you who didn’t know, GIMP stands for GNU Image Manipulation Program which can be used for editing images and transcoding between various image formats, free-form drawing, and many more specialized tasks. It is a cross-platform image editor available for GNU/Linux, macOS, Windows, and more operating systems.

  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 GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) on a Fedora 36.

• Linuxiac ☛ How to Install VirtualBox on AlmaLinux / Rocky Linux: A Full Guide

  This guide will walk you through the steps to install VirtualBox, a general-purpose full virtualizer app, on AlmaLinux or Rocky Linux.

  VirtualBox is a free and open-source virtualization software commonly used at the desktop level to create a test environment. It enables you to create and run virtual machines, which are guest operating systems including Linux, Windows, Unix, and Solaris.

  Unfortunately, VirtualBox is not available for installation in the official AlmaLinux and Rocky Linux repositories. However, there is an effortless and straightforward way to install it, which we will show you in easy-to-follow steps in this guide.

• Make Use Of ☛ How to Use Timeshift to Backup and Restore Your Linux System

  Being an operating system that’s highly customizable and relies heavily on CLI interactions, Linux is susceptible to system failures caused by incorrect commands or system operations. So if you use Linux on your main computer, you may frequently encounter problems.

  Fortunately, there are system restoration tools that create snapshots of your files and settings, which you can restore on your system to put it back to its previous functioning point in case any of your operations renders it unusable.

  Timeshift is one such tool for Linux. And in this guide, we’ll walk you through the instructions to use it on your Linux machine.

• Linux Hint ☛ How to Install Krita on Ubuntu 22.04

  Krita is a free and open-source fully featured digital painting software that offers a clean interface, robust brush engine and resource manager. Whether you create animations, comics, story arts or other digital drawings Krita is a perfect choice as it offers several tools making your painting experience a worthy one.

  In this tutorial, we will guide you how to install Krita on Ubuntu 22.04.

• Linux Hint ☛ How to Install My Weather Indicator for Ubuntu 22.04 (LTS)

  My Weather Indicator is a perfect application especially designed for Ubuntu users to provide them with weather updates of any part of the world. It displays the weather information and forecast through a desktop widget and system tray indicator applet. It provides support for various other weather services like Yahoo, Wunderground, OpenWeatherMap and World Weather Online.

  This article will guide you how to install My Weather Indicator for the latest Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish.

• Linux Hint ☛ How to Install PyCharm on Ubuntu 22.04

  PyCharm is a top-notch programming IDE used by programmers to program Python codes. Besides having the ability to run different high-level codes, it also features code debugging and has proven successful in developing multiple web applications.

  In this guide, we will guide you how you can install PyCharm both editions on Ubuntu 22.04.

• How to Install osTicket on AlmaLinux

  In this tutorial, we are going to install osTicket on AlmaLinux and explain in step-by-step detail how to configure it

• Ubuntu Handbook ☛ How to Record Your Desktop with Audio in Ubuntu 22.04 LTS

  Want to record your screen or app window with sounds? Here’s how to do this in Ubuntu 22.04 LTS.

  Ubuntu 22.04 comes with built-in screen recording UI. By pressing Ctrl+Shift+Alt+R key combination on keyboard, you can open it and select recording full-screen or a selection area. However, it does not record audio!

• Introduction to VirtIO

  In this document, we will be taking a look at the fundamentals of VirtIO from a technical standpoint as well as a deep dive into some of its key areas. This introduction to VirtIO is written assuming the reader has little to no working knowledge of VirtIO, but should also be a helpful refresher to those who are already familiar.

• Linux Hint ☛ How to install Clementine Music Player on Ubuntu 22.04

  Clementine is one of the top-notch and free music players for several operating systems including Windows, Linux and macOS. Besides playing music from your system, it allows you the freedom to listen to the music from the Internet making it a perfect choice for Ubuntu 22.04 desktop.

  In this article, we will show you how you can install Clementine Music Player on Ubuntu 22.04.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

  • DrKonqi ❤️ coredumpd

    Since Plasma 5.24 DrKonqi, Plasma’s infamous crash reporter, has gained support to route crashes through coredumpd and it is amazing – albeit a bit unused. That is why I’m telling you about it now because it’s matured a bit and is even more amazing – albeit still unused, I hope that will change.

    To explain what any of this does I have to explain some basics first, so we are on the same page…

    Most applications made by KDE will generally rely on KCrash, a KDE framework that implements crash handling, to, well, handle crashes. The way this works depends a bit on the operating system but one way or another when an application encounters a fault it first stops to think for a moment, about the meaning of life and whatever else, we call that “catching the crash”, during that time frame we can apply further diagnostics to help later figure out what went wrong. On POSIX systems specifically, we generate a backtrace and send that off to our bugzilla for handling by a developer – that is in essence the job of DrKonqi.

Fedora Family / IBM

• Red Hat ☛ Access JFR data faster with Cryostat 2.1′s new download APIs

  Cryostat is a tool for managing JDK Flight Recorder data on Kubernetes. This article explains how new download APIs based on JSON Web Tokens (JWTs) help facilitate a more responsive and efficient download workflow in the Cryostat 2.1 web client.

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

• Ubuntu ☛ Canonical at ISC High Performance 2022 | Ubuntu

  With ISC High Performance 2022 just around the corner, now is a great time to get in touch with Canonical on all things HPC

  ISC High Performance is one of the main events on High Performance Computing (HPC) and Supercomputing and all relevant topics in that space such as High Performance Data Analytics (HPDA), Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning (AI/ML). It’s held in Germany each year, this time in Hamburg starting 30th of May and ending on the 1st of June

Open Hardware/Modding

• Arduino ☛ Mobiot is a system that lets anyone automate everyday objects

  So many tasks within a house can be reduced to a series of somewhat simple movements that are repeated each time that task is done, thus making it a prime target for automation. To make this process far easier than the traditional one of designing a robot by hand, writing some code and doing thorough testing, a team of researchers from UCLA and Texas A&M has created the Mobiot toolkit, which aims to combine each of these steps into a very straightforward application that takes care of the heavy lifting automatically.

Web Browsers

• Mozilla

  • Firefox Nightly: These Weeks in Firefox: Issue 116

Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra

• Document Foundation ☛ Last week of the Month of LibreOffice, May 2022!

  So far, 233 sticker packs have been awarded in the Month of LibreOffice, May 2022. But there’s still one more week to go – so if your name (or username) isn’t on the list, join in, help to make LibreOffice even better, and get some cool swag! We’ll have 10 bonus pieces of merchandise to give away, to 10 lucky people…

Programming/Development

• Dirk Eddelbuettel ☛ Dirk Eddelbuettel: RcppAPT 0.0.9: Minor Update

  A new version of the RcppAPT package with the R interface to the C++ library behind the awesome apt, apt-get, apt-cache, … commands and their cache powering Debian, Ubuntu and the like arrived on CRAN earlier today.

  RcppAPT allows you to query the (Debian or Ubuntu) package dependency graph at will, with build-dependencies (if you have deb-src entries), reverse dependencies, and all other goodies. See the vignette and examples for illustrations.

• Medevel ☛ Botonic: An open-source React framework for building Conversational apps

• Medevel ☛ ReacType: Open-source tool to Prototype your React project

• OpenFeature to Bring Open Source Standard to Feature Flags

  Feature flags are an important part of software development, and with the new open source OpenFeature effort they could become even easier to use.

• Perl / Raku

  • gfldex: Reducing sets

  • Perl ☛ What’s In That String?

    One of the steps of debugging Perl can be to find out what is actually in a string. There are a number of more-or-less informative ways to do this, and I thought I would compare them.

    For this I used two short strings. The first was just the concatenation of the characters whose ordinals are 24 through 39; that is, 16 ASCII characters straddling the divide between control characters and printable characters. The second was a small variation on the first, made by removing the last character and appending “\N{U+100}” (a.k.a. “\N{LATIN CAPITAL A WITH MACRON}”) to force the string’s internal representation to be upgraded.

    The results given below include the version of the module used, the actual code snippet that generated the output, the output itself, and any comments I thought relevant. All subroutines used to dump strings are exportable except for those called as methods. The sample code makes fully-qualified calls because of duplication of subroutine names between different modules.

Security

• LWN ☛ Security updates for Wednesday

  Security updates have been issued by Debian (lrzip and puma), Fedora (plantuml and plib), Oracle (kernel and kernel-container), Red Hat (firefox, kernel, kpatch-patch, subversion:1.14, and thunderbird), Scientific Linux (firefox and thunderbird), SUSE (kernel-firmware, libxml2, pcre2, and postgresql13), and Ubuntu (accountsservice, postgresql-10, postgresql-12, postgresql-13, postgresql-14, and rsyslog).

• LWN ☛ The Linux Foundation’s “security mobilization plan” [Ed: Making up numbers for a FUD campaign led by proprietary software companies that make back doors for the NSA]

  The Linux Foundation has posted an “Open Source Software Security Mobilization Plan” that aims to address a number of perceived security problems with the expenditure of nearly $140 million over two years.

• F-Droid ☛ Our build and release infrastructure, and upcoming updates | F-Droid – Free and Open Source Android App Repository

  Behind the scenes of F-Droid is a giant pile of automation to manage the process of building thousands of apps from source. This means checking out thousands of source repos, checking them all for updates, building and new releases, and securely signing them en masse. All builds are run in a fresh virtual machine guest instance known as the buildserver. All Gradle binaries and Android SDK packages are verified against our public logs of observed SHA-256 checksums. The transparency log processes also verify against upstream’s public checksums.

  Our setup runs on Debian almost exclusively. Debian is a leader in free software, rock solid servers, and reproducible builds. That makes it a natural home for F-Droid. We also work to ensure we maintain the packages we use, and build our processes on top of Debian packages. That means we share the maintenance with anything that uses Debian. It may seem like more work to give back, but our experience is that it pays off in the long run. The F-Droid community is able to maintain many things with a small team. Another example of this is this website itself: it is built using Jekyll packages that are all in Debian.

• LWN ☛ F-Droid: Our build and release infrastructure, and upcoming updates

  Here’s an update from F-Droid regarding upcoming changes to its build and distribution infrastructure.

• Bleeping Computer ☛ Tails 5.0 Linux users warned against using it “for sensitive information” [Ed: Microsoft-connected site shedding doubt on "Linux"]

  Tails developers have warned users to stop using the portable Debian-based Linux distro until the next release if they’re entering or accessing sensitive information using the bundled Tor Browser application.

• CISA ☛ CISA Adds 34 Known Exploited Vulnerabilities to Catalog [Ed: CISA ☛ Lots and lots of Microsoft. Actively exploited.]

  CISA has added 34 new vulnerabilities to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities Catalog, based on evidence of active exploitation. These types of vulnerabilities are a frequent attack vector for malicious cyber actors and pose significant risk to the federal enterprise. Note: to view the newly added vulnerabilities in the catalog, click on the arrow on the of the “Date Added to Catalog” column, which will sort by descending dates.

• USCERT ☛ Google Releases Security Updates for Chrome

  Google has released Chrome version 102.0.5005.61 for Windows, Mac, and Linux. This version addresses vulnerabilities that an attacker could exploit to take control of an affected system.

• Stable Channel Update for Desktop

• Drew DeVault ☛ Google has been DDoSing SourceHut for over a year

  Just now, I took a look at the HTTP logs on git.sr.ht. Of the past 100,000 HTTP requests received by git.sr.ht (representing about 2½ hours of logs), 4,774 have been requested by GoModuleProxy — 5% of all traffic. And their requests are not cheap: every one is a complete git clone. They come in bursts, so every few minutes we get a big spike from Go, along with a constant murmur of Go traffic.

  This has been ongoing since around the release of Go 1.16, which came with some changes to how Go uses modules. Since this release, following a gradual ramp-up in traffic as the release was rolled out to users, git.sr.ht has had a constant floor of I/O and network load for which the majority can be attributed to Go.

  I started to suspect that something strange was going on when our I/O alarms started going off in February 2021 (we eventually had to tune these alarms up above the floor of I/O noise generated by Go), correlated with lots of activity from a Go user agent. I was able to narrow it down with some effort, but to the credit of the Go team they did change their User-Agent to make more apparent what was going on. Ultimately, this proved to be the end of the Go team’s helpfulness in this matter.

• Fear, Uncertainty,
  Doubt/Fear-mongering/Dramatisation

  • Bleeping Computer ☛ New ‘Cheers’ Linux ransomware targets VMware ESXi servers [Ed: Well, ransomware is mostly a Windows issue and VMware is proprietary software, but then again, this is a Microsoft-connected site looking to alter or distort perceptions]

    A new ransomware named ‘Cheers’ has appeared in the cybercrime space and has started its operations by targeting vulnerable VMware ESXi servers.

    VMware ESXi is a virtualization platform commonly used by large organizations worldwide, so encrypting them typically causes severe disruption to a business’ operations.

• Privacy/Surveillance

  • Daily Maverick ☛ As the WEF meets, pressure is on world’s powerbrokers to shut down spyware industry

    The finance world’s powerbrokers are meeting at the World Economic Forum in Davos this week, and they must seize this opportunity to shut down an unchecked industry that’s bad for their reputations and disastrous for human rights.

    We need a moratorium limiting the sale, transfer and use of these cyber weapons until people’s rights are safeguarded under international human rights law backed by Davos leaders.

    The surveillance tech industry has long facilitated gross violations of human rights in darkness — no accountability, no checks and balances.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• New things with the capsule

  The capsule has moved from SDF to tilde.team, this has allowed me more freedom to upload pictures and host particularly long text files. Yay~

• Gemini input, and improving client support

  I have a couple of things to say in Gemini’s defence here, and a client UI suggestion.

  Adding an input-request line type would only have been a convenience feature, not affecting what the protocol can do, and would have sacrificed simplicity. I don’t think it was wrong to opt for simplicity over convenience, and certainly not obviously wrong.

  As long as TLS session resumption is being used (which is increasingly the norm), the overheads of a second request aren’t so huge.

Monopolies

• ZDNet ☛ This era of big tech exceptionalism has got to end: Australian eSafety Commissioner

• IAPP ☛ Digital advertising in the crossfire of upcoming EU regulations

  EU institutions have recently reached a political agreement on the Digital Markets Act and Digital Services Act. These regulations are set to have far-reaching consequences for the digital economy, particularly on how data is collected and processed for online advertising.

  The European co-legislators intended to address the online advertising industry, which collects massive amounts of data and bolsters a market imbalance that favors a small number of large technology companies.

  “We are optimistic that the DMA and DSA will address the gross imbalance of market power by a few large tech companies. The majority of the impact will be on the ability of these companies to continue profiling and targeting consumers across their digital lives,” said Chris Pedigo, Senior Vice President at Digital Content Next, an association of premium publishers.

• You’re Invited | Back to the Spectrum Future: The 20th Anniversary of the Spectrum Task Force