12.31.22

GNU/Linux

• Make Use Of ☛ 6 Benefits of Getting Your Computer From a Linux PC Maker

  Although you can install Linux on your laptop for free, there are immense benefits to buying a Linux computer directly from a dedicated vendor.

  You may not see Linux on any computers at a physical big-box store, but there are many companies that will sell you a PC with Linux pre-installed online. Even though these retailers often have higher prices, it’s still worth seeking these companies out when considering your next purchase. Here are some of the reasons why.

• Audiocasts/Shows

  • WordPress ☛ Episode 46: The WP Bloopers Podcast – WordPress News

    This episode of the WP Briefing features all the Josepha bloopers our little elves have stored away over the year.

  • Video ☛ Haiku Is Such A Unique Operating System – Invidious

    Haiku is an open-source operating system that specifically targets personal computing. Inspired by the old BeOS operating system, Haiku is fast, simple to use, easy to learn…

  • Video ☛ TLDR – Get Examples of Terminal Commands – Invidious

    Man and –help are good, but TLDR is perfect because it gives you real world examples without reading much.

• Kernel Space

  • LWN ☛ Linux 6.1.2

    I'm announcing the release of the 6.1.2 kernel.
    
    All users of the 6.1 kernel series must upgrade.
    
    The updated 6.1.y git tree can be found at:
    	git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git linux-6.1.y
    and can be browsed at the normal kernel.org git web browser:
    
    https://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-s...
    
    thanks,
    
    greg k-h
    

  • LWN ☛ Linux 6.0.16

    I'm announcing the release of the 6.0.16 kernel.
    
    All users of the 6.0 kernel series must upgrade.
    
    The updated 6.0.y git tree can be found at:
    	git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git linux-6.0.y
    and can be browsed at the normal kernel.org git web browser:
    
    https://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-s...
    
    thanks,
    
    greg k-h
    

  • LWN ☛ Linux 5.15.86

    I'm announcing the release of the 5.15.86 kernel.
    
    All users of the 5.15 kernel series must upgrade.
    
    The updated 5.15.y git tree can be found at:
    	git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git linux-5.15.y
    and can be browsed at the normal kernel.org git web browser:
    
    https://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-s...
    
    thanks,
    
    greg k-h
    
    

• Graphics Stack

  • Free Desktop ☛ [ANNOUNCE] mesa 22.3.2

    Hello everyone,
    
    The bugfix release 22.3.2 is now available, a day late because I've been
    sick. Aren't vacation days fun?
    
    Anyway, as it's been the holidays, this is a slow release, not much
    going on; the next one will probably be similar in that regard.
    
    If you find any issues, please report them here:
    
    https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/issues/new
    
    The next bugfix release is due in two weeks, on January 11th.
    
    Cheers,
      Eric
    
    

• Applications

  • Linux Links ☛ 24 Best Open Source Linux Note Takers – LinuxLinks

    It has often been said that information confers power, and that the most important currency in our culture today is information. Keeping track of bits and pieces of information is a minefield.

    In part, this is because of passable short term memory, coupled with what can only be described as ‘brain fog’. To combat this, we arm myself with open source software that helps us efficiently capture a lot of information. We generally prefer to keep our information local and cloud-free, primarily for security reasons. And we primarily advance software which doesn’t tie itself to any specific company or service, whether it’s Evernote, Google, or Microsoft.

    Note-taking apps are the online equivalent of notebooks, and because they’re digital, they can do more for you than paper can. Note-taking apps also include text search, so in a matter of seconds, you can find whatever notes you need.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • The New Stack ☛ Kubernetes 101: Deploy Portainer to a MicroK8s Cluster – The New Stack

    Portainer is a powerhouse container management platform that is not only perfectly at home with Docker deployments but with Kubernetes environments as well. However, as anyone who’s ever dealt with Kubernetes will tell you…it’s hard. Given how many moving pieces are to be had with a Kubernetes cluster, unless you really know what you’re doing, you’ll find managing such an environment can be an absolute nightmare.

    Thankfully, there are GUIs like Portainer that go a very long way to simplify your Kubernetes experience. Yes, you still have to have an understanding of how Kubernetes works — you need to know about namespaces, pods, networks, applications, ingresses, and much more. Imagine having a web-based GUI to clear away some of that confusion so you can actually get to the important part…deploying your applications and services.

    That’s what Portainer does and with the help of MicroK8s, you can deploy Portainer in such a way as to make managing Kubernetes exponentially easier.

  • Make Use Of ☛ How to Use Bash to Concatenate Strings

    Concatenation is the process of joining two values together. String concatenation is an integral part of programming and you’ll find a use for it in all types of software.

    Different programming languages deal with string concatenation in different ways. Bash offers a couple of methods of concatenating two strings.

    Take a look at how you can join strings together in Bash.

  • What is ’init’ Process and Command in Linux?

    In this article, you will learn about the short description of the init process, the runlevels of init, and the init command in a Linux system.

    [...]

    The “/etc/inittab” script is used by the “init” process. It has entries for processes that do basic things when the system starts up and shuts down, like showing the user a login screen with gettys, mounting and unmounting file systems, and managing daemons.

    As a result, it should be kept running until the system terminates. If the kernel is unable to start it, the system will reach a stage called “Kernel Panic“.

  • TecAdmin ☛ Running a Cronjob Inside Docker: A Beginner’s Guide – TecAdmin

    When it comes to scheduling jobs and programs that automatically run at set intervals or can be triggered by another event, you have plenty of options. You can use a general-purpose utility like cron, the built-in scheduler in macOS or Linux, or a specialized tool like AWS Lambda. Cron, though not as powerful as AWS Lambda, is a solid choice if you’re using containers because it’s designed to handle background tasks on Unix systems. With Docker, however, things get a little trickier because you can’t just launch a new cron instance from your terminal and expect it to work.

• Games

  • Godot Engine ☛ Godot Engine – 2022: A Retrospective

    The work of Godot 4.0 begun in 2019 when I forked it after 3.1 was released with the hopes of rewriting the rendering architecture using Vulkan as a target API. I worked on it alone for a while, while it was just a graphics fork.

    But then things happen, in the years in between the community (both users and contributors) grew massively and so did our funding thanks to many generous large donations.

    With more users come more demands and, suddendly, the will to use Godot for larger and more serious projects required that large parts of the core were modernized. Godot 3.x core architecture is still that of an engine of the late 2000s, when computers were single core and the difference in speed between CPU and memory was not as significant as it is today.

• Desktop Environments/WMs

  • GNOME Desktop/GTK

    • Felipe Borges: What a year!

      What a year, huh? There was something about 2022 that was different for me than the previous years. There were lots of things to celebrate and many to be sad about. This is my GNOME blog, but I am more and more convinced that I can’t separate my whole self from my ~work persona~. Life beyond the computer happens and shapes everything we do.

      Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has been in my mind a lot lately. I live relatively close to the conflict here in the Czech Republic, and you might not know, but Ukrainians were already the biggest immigrant community in here. I have many Ukrainians being part of my life and it breaks my heart seeing the pain they are going through. I feel the world has gone numb to the suffering of everyday life people and the conversations have become abstract, touching more on the ideological and political aspect of events than its impact on human life.

      Across the Atlantic my people in Brazil have experienced a significant decrease on their life standards and the news of people in my life enduring poverty and disease have kept me awake many nights this year. The sadness morphed into frustration and anger at those that have the means to revert this situation but instead choose to profit from it. Accountability won’t bring back the lives of the almost 1 million Brazilians that have passed in the last couple of years due to the government’s disturbing decision to NOT take action to alleviate the consequences of the pandemic.

Distributions and Operating Systems

• New Releases

  • Linuxiac ☛ Vanilla OS: Promising Idea, Disappointing Implementation

    Vanilla OS, a fresh new Linux distribution, has released its first stable version. Unfortunately, the final result is not yet ready for real usage.

    I was hesitant to write this piece. However, I was confused after reading a few articles about the brand-new Linux distribution Vanilla OS and comparing them to my personal experience with it.

    In addition to applauding stories about yet another new and exciting thing on the Linux horizon, we, as authors, need to give readers a trustworthy and expert evaluation of what we write about. Here’s my opinion on the new kid on the block, Vanilla OS.

  • LWN ☛ Vanilla OS 22.10 released [LWN.net]

    Vanilla OS is a new, Ubuntu-based distribution with an immutable(ish) core and a focus on containers. Version 22.10, the first stable release, is out.

  • Changelog 27 – Thriving Thirteen, Amazing Aperture, Careful Commonization – LineageOS – LineageOS Android Distribution

    As many of us start traveling again and the world returns to normal, of course, it’s time for us to break the status quo! You probably weren’t expecting to hear from us until… somewhere near April according to our historical releases? HA! Gotcha.

    With all that said, we have been working extremely hard since Android 13’s release last October to port our features to this new version of Android. Thanks to our hard work adapting to Google’s largely UI-based changes in Android 12, and Android 13’s dead-simple device bring-up requirements, we were able to rebase our changes onto Android 13 much more efficiently. This led to a lot of time to spend on cool new features such as our awesome new camera app, Aperture, which was written in large part by developers SebaUbuntu, LuK1337, and luca020400.

    Now, let’s remind everyone about versioning conventions – To match AOSP’s versioning conventions, and due to the fact it added no notable value to the end-user, we dropped our subversion from a branding perspective.

    As Android has moved onto the quarterly maintenance release model, this release will be “LineageOS 20”, not 20.0 or 20.1 – though worry not – we are based on the latest and greatest Android 13 version, QPR1.

  • 4MLinux Blog ☛ 4MLinux Releases: 4MLinux 42.0 Core BETA released.

    This is a core system (only about 15 MB in size) for the 4MLinux 42 series. The system includes: the Linux kernel 6.0.9, GNU C Library 2.36, and BusyBox 1.34.1. The 4MLinux 42 series uses GNU Compiler Collection 12.2.0 to compile programs designed for the x86_64 architecture.

    Despite its extremely small size, 4MLinux Core supports both BIOS and UEFI boot modes.

• Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

  • Linux On Mobile ☛ LINMOB.net – Looking back, looking forward (2022/2023)

    To be frank: When I look back at 2022, I look back in disappointment at my output. I did not manage to deliver the promised “2 Years with PinePhone video”, I did not manage to go through with a series of blog posts about the Librem 5 that I planned with my original October 23rd, 2017, pre-order-Librem 5 that arrived in March – in fact, I barely touched the thing. And while LinuxPhoneApps.org is technically a separate project, I did not nearly manage to add the number of apps I hoped to add.

    Time and energy were just far too scarce, due to a new, demanding day-job, and also due to private matters – I don’t want to go into detail, so let’s just say Re-evaluating Priorities, Section Two, Paragraph One still applies – which, in many ways is good, considering the alternative scenario.

    So, at the end of this year, I sit here with batteries depleted and have to summarize: Personally, 2022 really sucked.

  • Colors of Noise: Phosh 2022 in retrospect

    I wanted to look back at what changed in phosh in 2022 and figured I could share it with you. I’ll be focusing on things very close to the mobile shell, for a broader overview see Evangelos upcoming FOSDEM talk.

  • Wired ☛ Update Android Right Now to Fix a Scary Remote-Execution Flaw | WIRED

  • HowTo Geek ☛ How Long Can You Keep Using an Android Phone?

  • HowTo Geek ☛ Can You Use an Android Phone Without a Google Account?

  • XDA ☛ LineageOS 20 based on Android 13 is here, bringing new features and a new default camera app

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• SaaS/Back End/Databases

  • PostgreSQL ☛ PostgreSQL: pgCluu version 3.4 released

    pgCluu is a Perl program used to perform a full audit of a PostgreSQL Cluster performances. It is divided in two parts, a collector used to grab statistics on the PostgreSQL server using psql and sar, a reports builder that will generate all HTML and charts output.

  • PostgreSQL ☛ PostgreSQL: external_file extension v1.1 released

    Allow access to “external files” from PostgreSQL server file systems.

    This extension adds the same functionalities given by the Oracle’s BFILE data type that stores unstructured binary data in flat files outside the database. A BFILE column stores a file locator that points to an external file containing the data: (DIRECTORY, FILENAME). Here the data type is called EFILE.

    The extension access to external files using secure call to the server side lo_* functions and not by directly reading/writing to files.

• Programming/Development

  • Trail Of Bits ☛ How I gave ManticoreUI a makeover

    During my internship at Trail of Bits, I explored the effectiveness of symbolic execution for finding vulnerabilities in native applications ranging from CTF challenges to popular open source libraries like image parsers, focusing on finding ways to enhance ManticoreUI. It is a powerful tool that improves accessibility to symbolic execution and vulnerability discovery, but its usability and efficiency leave much room for improvement. By the end, I implemented new ManticoreUI features that reduce analysis time through emulation, improved shared library support, and enabled symbolic state bootstrapping from GDB to side-step complex program initialization. With these new features, I found and reported a vulnerability in the DICOM Toolkit (DCTMK), which is a widely deployed set of libraries used in medical imaging!

  • Trail Of Bits ☛ Manticore GUIs made easy

    Trail of Bits maintains Manticore, a symbolic execution engine that can analyze smart contracts and native binaries. While symbolic execution is a powerful technique that can augment the vulnerability discovery process, it requires some base domain knowledge and thus has its own learning curve. Given the plethora of ways in which a user can interact with such an engine and the need for frequent context switching between a disassembler and one’s terminal or script editor, integrating symbolic execution into one’s workflow can be daunting for a beginner.

  • Using Emacs for R

    To start using R, or almost anything else in Emacs you basically need to know 3 things: 1) How to move in Emacs, meaning understanding what is what and learning a few key commands; 2) What is the configuration file and how to use it and 3) How to use packages to extend Emacs. In the first half of this post I will try to show how easy it is to cover these 3 points even for people who are inexperienced in programming. If you don’t believe me I invite you to read just the first paragraph of the next section to give you an idea of how easy it really is. During the second half I will show how I’m using R in Emacs to give you a starting point of a fully functional environment for R, and will conclude with some topics that can be further explored.

  • HowTo Geek ☛ How to Use Git merge

    Git was designed to make branching simple and fast. In contrast to other version control systems, branching on Git is a trivial matter. On multi-developer projects especially, branching is one of Git’s core organizational tools.

    Branches sandbox new development efforts so that code can be modified or added without affecting the code in other branches, especially the main or master branch. This usually contains the stable version of your code base.

    Isolating these changes from your stable code version makes perfect sense. But sooner or later the new code will be tested, reviewed, and rubber-stamped to be rolled into the master branch. At that point, you need to merge your branch into the master branch.

    Actually, branches can have sub-branches so you might be merging your branch into some other branch instead of the master branch. Just remember that merges always take one branch and merge it into a target branch, whatever that branch may be. If you want to merge your master branch into another branch, you can even do that too.

    Like most actions in Git, you perform merges in your local repository and push them to your remote repository.

  • Perl / Raku

    • Perl ☛ Marketing Committee Achievements in 2022 | tprfmarketing [blogs.perl.org]

      Looking back over 2022 the Marketing Committee presents our accomplishments to the Board and the Communities we serve.

      [...]

      We are excited for the opportunities that the new year presents and express our continuing commitment to growing the Perl and Raku communities.

      The committee exists to coordinate and facilitate volunteer efforts to promote the Perl and Raku ecosystems, create and distribute quality content, promote Perl and Raku related events, and assist with getting people involved.

Leftovers

• Science

  • uni Duke ☛ Designing With DNA | Duke Today

    But the researchers say these are more than mere nano-sculptures. The software could allow researchers to create tiny containers to deliver drugs, or molds for casting metal nanoparticles with specific shapes for solar cells, medical imaging and other applications.

  • ACM ☛ Designing with DNA

    An open-source software program developed by researchers at Duke and other universities lets users take drawings or digital models of rounded shapes and turn them into 3-D structures made of DNA.

    While researchers have been experimenting with DNA as a construction material since the 1980s, designing structures with curved surfaces like those found in nature has been tricky. Duke Ph.D. student Dan Fu is part of a team that developed software called DNAxiS, which relies on a previously described way to build with DNA by coiling a long DNA double helix into concentric rings that stack on each other. DNAxiS lets users design shapes automatically, using algorithms to determine where to place short DNA “staples” to join the longer DNA rings together and hold the shape in place.

Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal

  • reviewed and published our highlights of the year

    what mostly defined the year was the start of my phd program and our big move from mexico city to madrid.

• Politics

  • The “Russia Russia Russia” hoax

    The Mueller investigation found a Justice Department guideline that prohibits the federal indictment of a sitting president, but resulted in charges against 34 individuals and 3 companies, 8 guilty pleas, and a conviction at trial. This prohibitory guideline kinda makes sense in theory since it’d put us in a position where we’d have to rely on the executive branch to police itself (both president’s office and the DoJ are that branch), but the real check on the presidency, impeachment, has been corrupted to uselessness by partisanship. In practice all the branches — even the court system — have divided among party lines.

• Technical

  • Internet/Gemini

    • RSS – A Follow-up

      Get an RSS reader and connect everything to it!

      Between switching to Mastodon for my social media allowance, and using a dedicated RSS reader has really cut down my overall consumption and wasted PC time.