The Kubuntu Focus team today announced the immediate availability of kfocus-source, a unified GitHub repository containing the Kubuntu Focus Suite. This software has always been published under the GPLv2 license, but now with kfocus-source, it’s easier to review and contribute within the standard GitHub interface.
The kfocus-source repository provides the Kubuntu Focus Suite of tools, configurations, and hardware optimizations that work in harmony with standard Kubuntu 22.04 LTS. It is carefully designed to avoid reinventing the wheel and does not, for example, contain a variation of an entire operating system, or a shell on top of it. This adds unique value to an already vibrant and broadly supported ecosystem and community.
What's up, Linux Community!!! In this video, I cover Gtop, which is an alternative to top and htop. These tools are used to monitor system resources and processes within the Linux terminal.
Welcome to the 491st installment of Linux in the Ham Shack. In this deep dive episode, the hosts expand on their topic from the previous episode, focusing on new radio amateurs getting into the hobby. This episode focuses on tips, tricks, insights, recommendations and resources for people new to the hobby. We hope you find this episode entertaining and informative. Have a great week.
A Quick Overview of Linux Lite 6.2.
This week in the Weekly News Roundup, Privacy-focused cameras Eufy are not as private as advertised. We see Windows malware scaning phones and other attached devices for anything interesting, and Linus is being hard on the developers before the holiday festivities sets in.
Kernels 6.0.11 and 5.15.81 are now available in the PCLinuxOS Software Repository.
Earlier this year, I joined Collabora for a six-month internship to learn how V4L2 (Video4Linux2) supports stateless video hardware decoding. My project was to build a utility that traced and replayed stateless decoding from a userspace perspective. The utility, called the v4l2-tracer, is intended to be part of v4l-utils, a collection of utilities and libraries to handle media devices. The code is currently under review on the mailing list: [PATCH v4] utils: add v4l2-tracer utility.
Although there are many excellent tracing tools, such as strace, the v4l2-tracer traces V4L2 stateless decoding more comprehensively. It adds the ability to replay (i.e. "retrace") the traced activity, portably, between different userspace environments. The project was inspired by another tool, apitrace, which provides the same tracing and retracing functionality for certain graphics APIs.
Google has a firm grip on the desktop. Their products and services are ubiquitous. Don’t get us wrong, we’re long-standing admirers of many of Google’s products and services. They are often high quality, easy to use, and ‘free’, but there can be downsides of over-reliance on a specific company. For example, there are concerns about their privacy policies, business practices, and an almost insatiable desire to control all of our data, all of the time.
What if you are looking to move away from Google and embark on a new world of online freedom, where you are not constantly tracked, monetised and attached to Google’s ecosystem.
In this series we explore how you can migrate from Google without missing out on anything. We recommend open source solutions.
If you recently moved to Ubuntu from Windows or macOS and are looking for a way to install drivers in Ubuntu, you have come to the right place. We have added 4 detailed methods to update drivers in Ubuntu, right from downloading additional drivers to installing Nvidia’s latest graphical drivers. Apart from that, we have written separate articles on how to switch between Wayland and Xorg in Ubuntu and have compiled the best screen recording tools on Ubuntu for new users on Linux. On that note, let’s go ahead and learn how to manually install drivers in Ubuntu.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install FFmpeg on Fedora 37. For those of you who didn’t know, FFmpeg is a collection of free software that can record, convert and stream audio and video. With FFmpeg, you can easily convert your files into the format you need without worrying about compatibility issues. FFmpeg is developed on GNU/Linux but can be compiled on most operating systems, including Windows.
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 FFmpeg on a Fedora 37.
Today we are looking at how to install Google Earth Pro on a Chromebook.
If you have any questions, please contact us via a Rumble comment and we would be happy to assist you!
In this tutorial, we are going to install vsftpd and set it up for a user’s directory on Ubuntu 22.04
VSFTPD is a shortcut of a very secure FTP daemon and is an FTP server for Unix systems, including Linux. Vsftpd is the default FTP server in the Ubuntu, CentOS, and RHEL distributions. System administrators, daily, are adding new users to the systems and configuring the vsftpd to allow the user to upload files or folders only in their directories on the server. This scenario is mostly for resellers who want their users to have limited access.
Installing and configuring the vsftpd for a user’s directory on Ubuntu 22.04 is a straightforward process. Let’s get started!
In this tutorial, we are going to show you how to install Varnish on Ubuntu 22.04.
Varnish cache is a web application accelerator that is used as caching HTTP reverse proxy. The varnish case has many advantages against other caching software and can speed up delivery up to 1000 times. Varnish offers many features such as private CDN, Gzip compression and decompression, HTTP streaming pass & fetch, etc.
In this blog post for the installation, we are going to configure it with the Apache web server. This process is very easy and may take up to 20 minutes. Let’s get started!
 The new ‘MoreWaita‘ icon set does just that.
This community-based icon pack seeks to faithfully craft Adwaita-style icons icons for third-party apps, tools, and services, bringing them into the visual fold to effect a more consistent, unified look across the system.
Or to let the folks behind MoreWaita explain: “The purpose of MoreWaita is to add to Adwaita, not modify it, and to do roughly what Breeze does for KDE. This theme does not override any Adwaita icons, nor any Gnome Circle apps icons, nor icons that generally fit into the Adwaita paradigm (like Transmission GTK).”
KDE's End of Year Fundraiser is officially live! Your donations will help us reach our goals, support our community, fund our events, and show the world how everybody can benefit from KDE software.
Today we have the ambitious goal of raising 20,000€ for the KDE. Your donation allows KDE to continue developing the spectacular Plasma desktop and all the apps you need for education, productivity, and creative work.
Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from November 25 to December 02.
Before implementing drag and drop between list widgets (the grid view or thumbnail strip and the workspace), we'd better stop using the now deprecated widgets. This mean it is time to remove GtkIconView and GktTreeView as I would hate having to implement drag and drop twice.
Now, the grid view / thumbnail strip no longer uses GtkIconView. There are still a few visual adjustments to perform, notably how to get square cells, or rethink the layout. This also got rid of the last leftovers from cbindgen.
The workspace (the treeview that list the content of the catalog) is a bit more tricky as the API for tree view with GtkListView has a few limitations and complexities, but it's mostly done as to have the functionality. It's the last big patch in November.
Automated testing is important to ensure software continues to behave as it is intended and it’s part of more or less all modern software projects, including GNOME Shell and many of the dependencies it builds upon. However, as with most testing, we can always do better to get more complete testing. In this post, we’ll dive into how we recently improved testing in GNOME Shell, and what this unlocks in terms of future testability.
PyGObject is currently undermaintained, even after the heroic efforts of Christoph Reiter to keep the fires burning through the long night. The Python community needs more people to work on the bindings, if we want Python to be a first class citizen of the ecosystem.
There’s a lot to do, and not nearly enough people left to do it.
Dear Tumbleweed users and hackers,
There seems to be no stopping Tumbleweed. It has again been rolling at full speed, with 7 snapshots (1125…1201) released this week. As usual, some smaller, some larger ones.
Here’s your weekly Fedora report. Read what happened this week and what’s coming up. Your contributions are welcome (see the end of the post)!
Fedora Linux 35 will reach end of life on 2022-12-13.
I have weekly office hours on Wednesdays in the morning and afternoon (US/Eastern time) in #fedora-meeting-1. Drop by if you have any questions or comments about the schedule, Changes, elections, or anything else. See the upcoming meetings for more information.
Testing has begun of the Linux Mint 21.1 Beta ISO images, according to the Linux Mint website. The list shows that the Cinnamon, MATE, and Xfce editions are being tested at the time of writing, and they will either be approved for Beta release or rejected. If they fail the tests and get rejected, new images will have to be tested instead, delaying the release of the Beta by an extra day or two.
In September, Clem Lefebvre, head of the Linux Mint project, stated that Linux Mint 21.1 codenamed Vera, will launch around Christmas. The project usually has a two-week period before this where it asks the community to try out a Beta release so that any last minute issues can be sorted out before the final release comes out.
Once the next version of Linux Mint does arrive around Christmas, people on Linux Mint 21 will be able to easily upgrade their system through the update manager, but it’s not required if you’re happy with Linux Mint 21. Over its lifetime, Linux Mint 21 will receive three point releases, taking it to Linux Mint 21.3. Each of these versions will be supported until the first half of 2027, by which time, Linux Mint 23 should be available, so you’ll probably have upgraded by then anyway.
The ARMedOne is a carrier board in E-ATX form-factor that can handle popular SO-DIMM computer modules like the Raspberry Pi CM3/CM4, Jetson Nano/Xavier/TX2 NX, NXP iMX8, etc. The product is expected to be released around mid-December 2022 on Kickstarter.
The ARMedOne is a PC/Server mainboard capable of housing up to 28 computer modules from Raspberry Pi, NVIDIA or any other as long as it’s SO-DIMM compatible (3.3V, 5V or 12V). The mainboard is featured in a E-ATX form-factor (~305 Ãâ 330mm) so it’s expected to fit in most E-ATX PC cases or even in Rack-server to deliver high-computing performance within constrained dimensions.
w known as Meta) in 2016 with the 1.0 release debuting in 2018. In September 2022, Meta moved the PyTorch project to the new PyTorch Foundation, which is operated by the Linux Foundation.
Comet released Kangas, an open-source smart data exploration, analysis and model debugging tool for machine learning.
[...]
Kangas was designed for the entire community, to be embraced by students, researchers and the enterprise. As individuals and teams work to further their ML initiatives, they will be able to leverage the full benefits of Kangas. Being open source, all are able to contribute and further enhance it as well.
Why it matters: ClamAV describes itself as an open-source antivirus engine for detecting trojans, viruses, malware & other malicious threats. Detection levels are pretty low compared to Windows antimalware programs, yet the development has been going on for decades. The tool is available on all platforms, even though it's targeted primarily at Linux.
ClamAV recently released its latest version, an update that can be considered historically significant despite its lackluster changelog. The milestone is ClamAV finally reaching version 1.0.0. It's the first major release as versioning conventions go, and it came only six months after celebrating its 20th birthday.
On the 16th and 20th of November, Adrien Plazas and I had a booth at the French Free Software event “Le Capitole du Libre” in the city of Toulouse. It was the first time the event was taking place since 2019. As for the previous years, this edition was a success and we have met a lot of people during the two days. In this blog post, I will give a short summary of the most frequently asked questions.
Remember Midori? The lightweight web browser that was default in Elementary OS and Bodhi Linux revived!
Midori was a popular lightweight web browser used the WebKitGTK rendering engine and GTK UI toolkit. The development of the project was however discontinued more than 3 years ago. And, Ubuntu even removed it from system repository since Ubuntu 22.04 LTS.
According to the Wikipedia, the Midori project has been merged with the Astian Foundation in 2019. And, Astian announced a week ago that Midori browser is still alive!
It’s now Chromium based web browser that using Electron and React with both desktop edition for Linux, macOS, and Windows, and mobile edition for Android.
The browser still aims to be lightweight, fast and free. It’s still an open-source app, with the source code host in gitlab project page.
We've just released Chrome 108 (108.0.5359.79) for Android: it'll become available on Google Play over the next few days.
This release includes stability and performance improvements. You can see a full list of the changes in the Git log. If you find a new issue, please let us know by filing a bug.
The Stable channel has been updated to 108.0.5359.94 for Mac and Linux and 108.0.5359.94/.95 for Windows, which will roll out over the coming days/weeks. A full list of changes in this build is available in the log.
It is a bit of an early Christmas for people using Apple Silicon machines (Apple M1, M2…) as we release for the first time ever a stable version of GIMP for this architecture!
It is a revision package for GIMP 2.10.32, already released a few months ago, re-built with our new MacPorts-based infrastructure on both x86_64 (“macOS on Intel” architecture) and AArch64 (“macOS on Apple Silicon”).
Note that we provide 2 DMG packages now, one for each architecture, not a single universal package. The website will try and detect which architecture you are on, but if it fails to detect properly (detection is not as easy on some browsers), be careful to choose the version for the correct hardware (“for Intel” or “for Apple Silicon“).
LibreOffice uses a build system that has the name gbuild which works on the top of GNU Make. Migrating from the old build system to gbuild is started in the OpenOffice days, but the migration took a while, and a lot of efforts, and finished around LibreOffice 4.1.
This LibreOffice build system uses GNU Make, Perl and Python, so you need to have these prerequisites in order to be able to build LibreOffice.
Amazon web arm investing in Microsoft's platform to help customers escape Windows
Undefined behavior (UB) is a tricky concept in programming languages and compilers. Over the many years I've been an industry mentor for MIT's 6.172 Performance Engineering course, An excellent class that I highly recommend. It's very thorough and hands-on, at the expense of also requiring a lot of work at a very fast pace. When I took it as an undergrad, that was a great tradeoff, but YMMV. I've heard many misconceptions about what the compiler guarantees in the presence of UB. This is unfortunate but not surprising!
For a primer on undefined behavior and why we can't just "define all the behaviors," I highly recommend Chandler Carruth's talk "Garbage In, Garbage Out: Arguing about Undefined Behavior with Nasal Demons."
You might also be familiar with my Compiler Adventures blog series on how compiler optimizations work. An upcoming episode is about implementing optimizations that take advantage of undefined behavior like dividing by zero, where we'll see UB "from the other side."
My colleagues recently wrote a great post on the Netflix tech blog about a tough performance issue they wrestled with. They ultimately diagnosed the problem as false sharing, which is a performance problem that involves caching.
I’m going to take that post and write a simplified version of part of it here, as an exercise to help me understand what happened. After all, the best way to understand something is to try to explain it to someone else.
But note that the topic I’m writing about here is outside of my personal area of expertise, so caveat lector!
Something I find frustrating is how hard it is to teach debugging skills. I think the biggest reason is because there are many things that can only be learned through experience. This is true for anything that requires pattern recognition. Our brains are great at recognizing patterns, but it often takes a large amount of practice to be able to identify useful patterns in data.
I can’t instantly give you pattern recognition skills with a short blog post, but I can tell you about some of the patterns that I look for so you can start to train your brain to see these as well. Recognizing patterns in memory can be useful as it can give you a hint for things like memory corruption, which are often some of the hardest errors to debug from a postmortem analysis. Getting a rough idea of what type data is ovewriting other data in a process can tell you where to look next for the source of memory corruption. It can help narrow down where an issue might be because the bug is usually near the code that wrote this data.
I gave a talk at DjangoCon US 2022 in San Diego last month about productivity on personal projects, titled “Massively increase your productivity on personal projects with comprehensive documentation and automated tests”.
The alternative title for the talk was Coping strategies for the serial project hoarder.
I’m maintaining a lot of different projects at the moment. Somewhat unintuitively, the way I’m handling this is by scaling down techniques that I’ve seen working for large engineering teams spread out across multiple continents.
The key trick is to ensure that every project has comprehensive documentation and automated tests. This scales my productivity horizontally, by freeing me up from needing to remember all of the details of all of the different projects I’m working on at the same time.
Picture this: it’s a work day at an enterprise payments processing company, and there is a critical data engineering task that needs to be completed. In this case, I’m the data engineer who needs to finish the task, but I am missing information necessary for my data model to be finished. I heard the information in a meeting. It was discussed in the daily standup. I have some vague typed notes, but I can’t recall the technical details I need to finish my work. No one is available to answer my question. It’s then that it hits me: I should have written down notes by hand during the meeting.
Writing notes by hand would have given me several different tangible resources that could help me find the critical missing information: a stronger memory of the meeting I was in, the gaps in the details of the discussion that occurred, and the notes themselves that would help me trigger a stronger recall of the events just by reviewing them on paper. Detailed typed notes would not help my recall and retention of the information in the meetings in the same way that notes written by hand would, though they would have been helpful.
When interviewing programmers, I often ask them to code a simple program to count word frequencies in a text file. It’s a good problem that tests a bunch of skills, and with some follow-up questions, allows you to go surprisingly deep.
One of the follow-up questions I ask is, “What’s the performance bottleneck in your program?” Most people say something like “reading from the input file”.
In fact, I was inspired to write this article after responding to someone on Gopher Slack, who said, “I also note there’s a lot of extra work happening here in splitting the entire line, etc, it’s just that typically this is all so much faster than I/O that we don’t care.”
I’m not picking on him … before I analyzed the performance of the count-words problem, I thought the same. It’s what we’ve all been taught, right? “I/O is slow.”
Not anymore! Disk I/O may have been slow 10 or 20 years ago, but in 2022, reading a file sequentially from disk is very fast.
the short of it is: they’re cool for appending notes from automated systems (like ticket or build systems) but not really for having interactive conversations with other developers (at least not yet)
Santa’s world was increasingly going high-tech, and his IT department was polishing off its new process that could take the millions of letters received from boys and girls around the world, scan them into digital form with state-of-the-art optical character recognition hardware, and produce outputs that could greatly streamline the Santa Corporation’s production for Christmas delivery.
One problem had initially stymied them, but consultants from the Raku community came to their aid. (As you may recall, IT had become primarily a Raku shop because of the power of the language for all their programming needs ranging from shop management to long-range planning.) The problem was converting the digital output from the OCR hardware to final PDF products for the factories and toy makers. The growing influence of Github and its Github-flavored Markdown format had resulted in IT’s post-OCR software converting the text into that format.
That was fine for initial use for production planning, but for archival purposes it lacked the capability to provide textual hints to create beautiful digital documents for permanent storage. The Raku consultants suggested converting the Markdown to Rakupod which has as much potential expressive, typesetting power as Donald Knuth’s TeX and its descendants (e.g., Leslie Lamport’s LaTex, ConTeXt, and XeTeX). As opposed to those formats, the Rakupod product is much easier to scan visually and, although current Raku products are in the early stages of development, the existing Rakupod-to-PDF process can be retroactively improved by modifying the existing Rakupod when future products are improved.
Back to the full three of us. Not much needed looking at this week.
Rust is awesome, for certain things. But think twice before picking it up for a startup that needs to move fast.
Imagine you are working on the next big thing that runs in the browser, and it requires some heavy-duty code, which need to run fast and efficient. You remember that your friend Jack told you about WebAssembly (Wasm), which supposedly runs faster than JavaScript (JS), so you decide to check it out.
Qualys’ Threat Research Unit has shown how a new Linux vulnerability could be chained with two other apparently harmless flaws to gain full root privileges on an affected system.
Qualys researchers demonstrated how to chain a new Linux flaw with two other two issues to gain full root privileges on an impacted system.
Researchers at the Qualys’ Threat Research Unit demonstrated how to chain a new Linux vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2022-3328, with two other flaws to gain full root privileges on an affected system.
The vulnerability resides in the snap-confine function on Linux operating systems, a SUID-root program installed by default on Ubuntu.
Throughout the last decade, data breaches have exploded in numbers, regularity, and severity. Consumer concerns around safety have similarly reached new highs, as they continue to bear the brunt of leaky databases and illicit cybercriminals. The security fabric of organizations is being stretched thinner than ever, but a worrying report has found that a concerning number of US employees simply don’t care.
As per the latest CERT-In security alert, multiple vulnerabilities have been reported in the Linux-based operating system designed by Google.
NVIDIA has released a security update for its GPU display driver for Windows, containing a fix for a high-severity flaw that threat actors can exploit to perform, among other things, code execution and privilege escalation.
The latest security update addresses 25 vulnerabilities on the Windows and Linux GPU drivers, while seven flaws are categorized as high-severity.
Our landlord, who lives just next door and turned 100 this year (!), told us that to cook pasta, she doesn't keep the water boiling during the approximate ten minutes required to obtain al dente pasta. Instead, once the water is boiling, simply add the pasta, wait for the water to start boiling again, then cut the fire, cover with a lid and a towel so that the heat is kept inside the pot. It takes maybe one or two minutes longer to cook.
Today's internet is a nightmare to use and navigate, in my opinion. I have little knowledge about the old internet. So, I don't have much to say about it, but from what I have experienced in the old internet is that it was actually decentralized. Firstly, our internet is occupied by the tech giants. When I talk about the internet, a normal person would think that it's something that makes Facebook work or something that helps us to chat with people in WhatsApp. The concept of internet being a social, decentralized hub where people can express themselves in their own way has been shadowed by the famous monopoly, i.e. meta(in my opinion, but there's google as well), and now it is seen as the place where we play by the rules of a company and express ourselves in short microblogs with limited number of words and a single UI where everyone is forced to be in the same place because they will be alone if they want to try something new.
"String as hex" is rather vague, and computers can be mighty picky about such details. Humans who have dealt with computers can also be picky, especially if they expect to have to support, fix, or write the code involved, and where they suspect moving goalposts as the details of what exactly a "string" is are revealed, and what exactly "as hex" means.
* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It's like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.