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Links 03/01/2023: DragonFly BSD 6.4, KDE Plasma 5.26.5, and EasyOS 4.5.4



  • GNU/Linux

    • Audiocasts/Shows

    • Graphics Stack

      • How Cursor is Rendered

        The new cursor design is more powerful and should make it easier to add new fancy features. For example, it would be amazing if you could wire the velocity of the cursor to its scale so you could shake the pointer in order to find the cursor more easily. The new design also fixes longstanding limitations that prevented kwin from displaying cursors rendered by OpenGL or Vulkan.

    • Applications

      • Make Use OfHow to Show Your Battery Percentage as a Wallpaper on Linux

        Having a wallpaper that automatically updates depending on your current battery status is a must for everyone who uses Linux as their daily driver.

        Running out of power can ruin your day—especially if you're using your Linux laptop for critical projects or are in the middle of a long-distance video call to friends and relations on the other side of the world.

        It's difficult to keep an eye on your battery life when you're busy, but with battery-wallpaper, you can keep an eye on your charge level just by glancing at your wallpaper.

      • Make Use Ofhaxor-news Lets You Browse and Search Hacker News From Your Linux Terminal

        haxor-news Lets You Browse and Search Hacker News From Your Linux Terminal

        Hacker News is an essential source of news and interesting articles for hackers, coders, and anyone with an interest in technology and tech culture.

        While you would normally read HN through a web interface, a dedicated app, or an email digest, you can read, search, and filter the latest articles through your terminal. Here's how.

      • ByteXD10 IP Scanners for Detecting and Analyzing Network Devices

        IP/Network scanning is a security process that helps identify network vulnerabilities and loopholes that can harm your system.

        IP scanning safeguards our network from attacks and unusual behaviors. Vulnerable networks lead to data leakage, and users may lose confidential information to exploiters.

        To ensure security, IP scanners can help. IP scanners have multiple purposes. Many popular IP scanners work very well.

        This article enlists the most popular IP scanners with descriptions regarding their features. It is essential to note that the listing hasn’t been done based on preference, and you should pick one with the features you want.

      • BusyBox 1.36.0 released
    • Instructionals/Technical

      • Make Tech EasierKdenlive Keyboard Shortcuts - Make Tech Easier

        One of the most significant selling points of Kdenlive is that it uses open audio and video codec standards through FFmpeg. This means that, similar to MPV, it is possible to use the program with almost any media format you might need. Further, Kdenlive also provides you with a set of powerful features through its extensive plugin system.

        By default, Kdenlive has several keybindings that you can use to do basic file manipulation, timeline editing and playback control. This cheatsheet aims to provide you with the basic set of keybindings for Kdenlive. Not only that, but it also aims to highlight some of Kdenlive’s little-known features.

      • Ubuntu Handbook[Quick Tip] How to Disable Event Sound in Ubuntu 22.04 | 22.10 | UbuntuHandbook

        Ubuntu by default play a short alert sound when you plug in/out USB drive, power supply, or hit tab function key in terminal.

        This is useful for indicating certain type of system messages and events, but it’s easy to mute these type of sounds in case you don’t like them. And, here’s the quick tutorial show you how.

      • TecAdminAdvanced "Apt Package Manager" Techniques for Linux Pros

        The apt command is one of the most powerful and versatile tools in the Linux operating system. It provides users with a powerful, yet easy-to-use, package management system that can be used to easily manage and install the software. With the apt command, users can quickly and easily search for, install, upgrade, and uninstall software applications from their systems.

        This guide provides a detailed overview of the apt command and explains how to use it to manage software on a Linux system. It explains the different commands and options available and outlines how to use them to manage software, resolve software dependencies, and keep your system running smoothly and efficiently.

      • Fixing an unresponsive gnome-software on Fedora

        A short note on fixing an unresponsive GNOME Softwate application.

      • Network WorldUsing the Linux locale command | Network World

        The locale settings in Linux systems help ensure that information like dates and times are displayed in a format that makes sense in the context of where you live and what language you speak. Here's how to use them.

        NOTE: None of the commands described in this post will change your locale settings. Some merely use a different locale setting to display the response you might be seeing from a different location.

      • VideoHow to install Inkscape on KDE Neon - Invidious

        In this video, we are looking at how to install Inkscape on KDE Neon. Enjoy!

      • ByteXDHow to Use SCP To Transfer Files with SSH Keys (PEM File) - ByteXD

        Every Linux administrator is well versed with various command-line utilities used to access and manage remote servers. Two of the most popular utilities are SSH and SCP. SSH or Secure Shell is a cryptographic protocol that enables you to remotely access a remote device securely over a network.

        SCP on the other hand works similar to the normal CP command you use to copy files on your system. The major difference is that SCP is used to securely copy files between a local and a remote system or across two remote systems.

        When you look at the two utilities (SSH and SCP) you will notice one major similarity – security. Both are trying to create a secure channel of communicating with other systems. What if you could combine the two? Well, that would definitely guarantee a maximum level of security.

      • ByteXDWhy is Rsync Skipping Directories - ByteXD

        The Rsync command is a popular utility for synchronizing files and directories between two remote systems.

        Unlike other utilities, Rsync is highly recommended for transferring large amounts of data over a network. That’s because it can efficiently transfer only the portions of files that have changed rather than transferring the entire file each time.

      • Linux Made SimpleHow to install Gedit on a Chromebook

        Today we are looking at how to install Gedit on a Chromebook.

        If you have any questions, please contact us via a Rumble comment and we would be happy to assist you!

        Please use the video as a visual guide, and the commands and links below to install it on your Chromebook.

      • Linux Made SimpleHow to install Mine-Imator 2.0 Pre-Release on a Chromebook

        Today we are looking at how to install Mine-Imator 2.0 Pre-Release 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.

    • Desktop Environments/WMs

      • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

        • KDEKDE Plasma 5.26.5, Bugfix Release for January

          Today KDE releases a bugfix update to KDE Plasma 5, versioned 5.26.5.

          Plasma 5.26 was released in October 2022 with many feature refinements and new modules to complete the desktop experience.

          This release adds a month's worth of new translations and fixes from KDE's contributors. The bugfixes are typically small but important and include...

        • 9to5LinuxKDE Plasma 5.26.5 Released with More Plasma Wayland Session Fixes

          KDE Plasma 5.26.5 is here five weeks after the KDE Plasma 5.26.4 update to fix more Plasma Wayland session bugs, including a KWin crash when connecting a laptop to a docking station, an issue that prevented external monitors from working when using various ARM-powered devices, as well as the ability to select text in GTK apps when disabling middle-click paste.

          With this update, KDE Plasma now no longer displays critical notifications in the Overview, Present Windows, and Desktop Grid effects. Also, it improves scrolling on the language list sheet on the Region and Language page in System Settings.

      • GNOME Desktop/GTK

        • DebugPointStunning Graphite Theme for GNOME, GTK4 and libadwaita

          If you are looking for a unique theme that concentrates on grey or dark grey, try the Graphite theme for the GNOME desktop.

          The Graphite theme' brings several variants' main attraction is the thick border with the combination of variants of grey, black, Nord and other items. You can also tweak the thickness using several options.

          Here's how to install it.

        • OMG UbuntuOne Thing – Put a Single Task/Goal in the GNOME Panel - OMG! Ubuntu!

          Next time you need to remember something important, don’t reach for a sticky note and pen. Instead, reach for the One Thing GNOME extension.

          This Linux version of the One Thing app for macOS works in the same way: you enter some text (and yup, emoji is supported too), and whatever you enter appears in the Top Bar (the panel that runs along the top of the screen in a standard GNOME Shell; if you use Dash to Panel, it’ll appear in that).

          As concepts go it’s not the most imaginative (so no cries of who copied who), but it doesn’t need to be. Sometimes, all it takes for us to actually get on and do something is to be reminded to do it. This does that, simply.

          There are no settings; you can’t customise the font, change text colour, make it blink, flash, or animate in some eye-catching way. You also can’t choose where on the panel the text sits (though this would be handy feature to have). Your “one thing” just stares out at you from the GNOME panel, from beside the Status Menu.

        • OMG! LinuxCustomize GNOME Touchpad Gestures with this Extension - OMG! Linux

          For greater control over multitouch gestures in GNOME Shell, check out the Gesture Improvements extension.

          This simple power-up lets you customize (almost) every swipe, pinch and scroll gesture in any Linux distribution using GNOME 40 or later.

          The extension is designed to work with Wayland and X11, though the latter requires an additional daemon to be installed, but that is not covered here.

  • Distributions and Operating Systems

  • Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

    • Events

    • Programming/Development

      • Python

        • Enrico Zini: Things I learnt in December 2022

          Python's multiprocessing is prone to deadlocks in a number of conditions. In my case, the running program was a standard single-process, non-threaded script, but it used complex native libraries which might have been the triggers for the deadlocks.

        • ByteXDPython: How to Use the If-Else Statement in One Line - ByteXD

          Conditional statements in python are commands for controlling actions and decisions. These conditional constructs take action based on a condition. The given condition evaluates to true or false (if condition is true then take action).

          In many cases, the executed action that is taken by a true condition is merely returning a value (assigning a new value to a target variable). Therefore, due to the simplicity of these types of if statements, many languages, including Python support inline if-else expressions.

          In this article, you will learn how to use inline conditional expressions in Python.

          The method of using if and else in the same line is usually referred to it as conditional expressions or ternary operations. The most common ternary conditional operator is ?: for many languages.

          For example, the subsequent ternary expression: (a ? b : c), which returns b if a is true, or to c if the a condition is false. However, there is a different syntax for Python. Its ternary expression looks like the following: (a if condition else b), just as before, the expression returns a if condition is true, otherwise to b if condition is false.

          In the later sections, we will explain how to use inline if-else expressions with examples.

  • Leftovers

    • Hardware

      • CubicleNateHP EliteBook RAM Failure - CubicleNate’s Techpad

        In all my time using computers, I haven’t had a memory failure since the late 80s on Commodore 64 which was likely caused by a static discharge. Every computer since, laptop or desktop, traveling around the world, have not seen any sort of memory issue. I’ve gong through hard drives, replaced screens, keyboards and touch pads but never memory. I basically assumed such things were a thing of the past. I have and keep many systems running, with the average age of actively used systems at 12 years old all with properly working memory. Yet it is my newest laptop has been afflicted with RAM failure.

      • Jonathan Dowlandjmtd → log → Tex Shinobi first impressions

        A small Taiwanese company, Tex, produce a series of mechanical keyboards very openly inspired by the IBM/Lenovo trackpoint models that I've been using for so long, complete with trackpoints. I'd been eyeing up their Tex Yoda II keyboard for some time, which looks great, very minimalistic, but in practise I do use the keys it omits, and it's pricey.

        I decided to take the plunge and buy a more key-ful and reasonably priced Tex Shinobi ISO/UK layout, and I opted for Cherry MX Silent Red switches. Silent to give me the option of using in the Newcastle office, but also to reduce the risk of waking up the kids at home.

        The Silent Reds are a bit "squishier" than raw Reds which is a shame, but not enough of an obstacle to typing rapidly. The keyboard shape and layout is a close clone of the old IBM Ultranav keyboards I used to use so I was at home on it straight away.

        The real unknown quantity to me was how well the trackpoint works. I'd read mixed responses, but it's not clear that the people reviewing it were very familiar with the Lenovo ones. I am pleased to report that it's indistinguishable to the Lenovo one to me (and I used that a lot).

        The keyboard came in a funky replica Thinkpad box and with some keycap and trackpoint pointer options. I opted for a yellow "hat" shaped trackpoint cover (to appease my yellow-obsessed youngest daughter) and the blue IBM-style Enter keycap.

    • Proprietary

    • Pseudo-Open Source

      • Openwashing

        • ArduinoThis project facilitates augmented reality Minecraft gaming [Ed: Arduino ought to refrain from covering proprietary Microsoft traps]

          Augmented reality (AR) is distinct from virtual reality (VR) in that it brings the real world into virtual gameplay.

        • FOSSLifeAWS Announces Finch, an Open Source Container-Building Tool [Ed: Openwashing stunt. AWS is proprietary is GitHub is proprietary. "FOSSlife Team" is misnomer. Microsoft boosters, proprietary software apologists. FOSSlife Team FOSSLifecovers things with no connection to FOSS.]

          According to the announcement, Finch “provides for simple installation of a native macOS client, along with a curated set of de facto standard open source components including Lima, nerdctl, containerd, and BuildKit. With Finch, you can create and run containers locally, and build and publish Open Container Initiative (OCI) container images.”

    • Security

      • LWNSecurity updates for Tuesday [LWN.net]

        Security updates have been issued by Oracle (bcel), SUSE (ca-certificates-mozilla, glibc, minetest, multimon-ng, nautilus, ovmf, python-Django, samba, saphanabootstrap-formula, and xrdp), and Ubuntu (usbredir).

      • Bruce SchneierBreaking RSA with a Quantum Computer - Schneier on Security

        A group of Chinese researchers have just published a paper claiming that they can—although they have not yet done so—break 2048-bit RSA. This is something to take seriously. It might not be correct, but it’s not obviously wrong.

        We have long known from Shor’s algorithm that factoring with a quantum computer is easy. But it takes a big quantum computer, on the orders of millions of qbits, to factor anything resembling the key sizes we use today. What the researchers have done is combine classical lattice reduction factoring techniques with a quantum approximate optimization algorithm. This means that they only need a quantum computer with 372 qbits, which is well within what’s possible today. (The IBM Osprey is a 433-qbit quantum computer, for example. Others are on their way as well.)

        The Chinese group didn’t have that large a quantum computer to work with. They were able to factor 48-bit numbers using a 10-qbit quantum computer. And while there are always potential problems when scaling something like this up by a factor of 50, there are no obvious barriers.

      • Dark ReadingWordPress Sites Under Attack from Newly Found Linux Trojan [Ed: The problem here is neither Linux nor WordPress but unpatched plugins. Misleading 'journalism', calling everything "Linux" when it is negative.]
      • IT World CANewly discovered Linux vulnerability rated 10 in severity [Ed: This headline is incorrect. It's not severity 10.]
    • Monopolies

      • Copyrights

        • AdafruitPublic Domain in 2023 #ArtTuesday

          I recently had a debate with my 10 year old nephew on the pros and cons of IP entering the public domain, his take was surprisingly nuanced.

          Regardless of how you feel, every year a list of works become public domain. As we roll through the 20’s we’ll see more and more movies on the list. This year we get Fritz Lang’s monumental sci-fi epicMetropolis. Other notables are works from Franz Kafka, Virginia Woolf, and Arthur Conan Doyle.

  • Gemini* and Gopher

    • Personal

      • What I've read in 2022

        It's been a weird year. When I wrote my mid-year “what's up” post, it was right before some turmoil happened IRL and at the same time I started a new job (already left it btw lol), and my reading habit that was going OK during the first half of the year simply ended. Still, I'm incredibly grateful of the love of my friends and family and I don't lose hope that 2023 will finally let more place to reading. OK! The books!

      • The Wanderer Returns (map upside down)

        Two months ago I had the grand idea of writing a post each night. We can see how well that went can’t we. What worries me is that I look back an have no recollection of what was going on to stumble after just two consecutive posts.

        Well, after finding my password (thanks the great maker for the underside of beer mats) I thought I would quietly sneak back in and sit in the corner. Lots to catch up on here at the bar it seems.

      • Day 003: The mushroom bed

        If the precedent room was dark, like the rest of the dungeon, with only the sculpted nude rock to reverberate the light of your torches (if you use torches), this one is naturally lighted by some of the wondrous and numerous plants (mostly different kinds of mushroom€¹, but not only) that occupy the room. The walls, instead of being straight and very obviously carved by something intelligent, seem natural, like if the cave was older than the rest of the dungeon, and just linked to it by a door (except for the door‘s wall).

      • emulation - basically immortal entertainment

        ay mates! another nostalgia related thing, even if i wasn't born on those years when the games i mention got released.

        these days i've been playing classic games from consoles like the nes, snes, gba, ds and many others through the power of emulation. actually, i've been using emulators ever since i was a kid on a windows xp machine, searching for "sonic 3 free download" or "mario games fun pc" or something goofy like that. i am surprised i never got a virus back then and i highly advise you to not do what i used to do. now i am smart and search on more known websites like vimm's lair. i also actually used to use emuparadise before the entire "free mario download english language not italian i am not mario" searching cycle.

    • Technical

      • Let's go back to IRC

        Modern IMs are bloated, annoying, spyware, time wasters, often proprietary, slow to load, awful to use on bad connections, actively try to sabotage your attention. It's time we should actively reconsider on how we, as a society, communicate via our devices, and the costs imposed on upon us by the services we use, or get used by.

        Why does a messaging program need typing notifications? Read receipts? Auto-playing videos? GIF avatars? Reactions? This is by no means a "hurr durr I'm living in a log cabin in the mountains, all that is new is stupid" commentary, it's just that we use a messaging program, to message. Not to waste another hour, mindlessly clicking through mentions, watching videos, and other specifically engineered "features" to make you spend as much time as possible on their program.

      • sbc woe woe - 2023-01-03

        i ended 2022 perplexed, disturbed, flame extinguished - and worse than all of that my RPi4-4gb died in the dark in a storm and now resides in a plastic box with three other sbcs.

        i think a loose emmc card did for the RPi4 - card unreadable, RPi4 un-bootable.

      • LOS20 and Nextcloud

        On that cheery note, I've upgraded all of my android sets to LineageOS version 20, based on Android 13. This seems to be the first android release that is reasonably up to date with the current mainline Linux kernel (6.x.x).

        I've seen a flourish of activity on the xda-developer forums from hobbyists who are releasing LOS20 builds for really old outdated handsets. I'm secretly patting myself on the back for keeping these old mobiles, and I don't know why LOS18 and LOS19 weren't so popular, but LOS20 really seems to be getting ported onto everything and anything!

      • Command line tools I'd like to use but can't

        miller[1] is a command line tool and scripting language that can be used to manipulate, transform and summarise structured data from CSV, JSON and other formats. Miller is fast and can handle pretty large datasets by streaming data rather than loading it all into RAM. I'd always hoped to use it for quickly exploring a new dataset, or for extracting data subsets for SEOSAW[2] data requests. What has held me back is that I know how to do basically everything that miller can do in an interactive R session. Maybe if I was in a role that only required data munging, rather than munging plus statistical analysis I would use miller more.

      • Internet/Gemini

        • The Gemini Mention amusing coincidence

          Nota: I started this entry as a short fun fact about a coincidence, and ended writing a long post responding to Martin and Sean, I'm sorry, but it seems I can't be concise…

          On Sunday, while publishing my review for 2022 from my new laptop, I had to reinstall a few things for the deployment of my capsule and blog to work. I was using an old version on kiln[1] (static capsule generator) on my previous laptop, so after installing the latest one, I had some issues to fix. I took the "opportunity" to clean a bit my capsu

      • Programming

        • Program Picker With Zenity

          Zenity is a small utility program for building simple graphical widgets and menus. I've never had use for it before, but a few days ago I ran into a situation that it just so happened to be perfect for.

          I have a program of which I currently have several different versions compiled. Stable, release candidate, latest, etc. Since I start pretty much everything through gmrun (look that up: it's the best part of searching in the Gnome 3 menu, but without the bloat of Gnome 3) I didn't want to have to remember which versions I currently have. Wouldn't it just be better to run a command and pick from the currently available builds?

        • Faster Index Joins

          The most common (and most costly) operation of the marginalia search engine's index is something like given a set of documents containing one keyword, find each documents containing another keyword.

        • Rogue

          rogue, or at least the oldest version I could find at the time on the Internet, did not compile on modern systems.


* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It's like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.



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