Bonum Certa Men Certa

Links 18/03/2023: Many HowTos, Several New Releases

  • GNU/Linux

    • Desktop/Laptop

      • Notebook Check ☛ MNT Pocket Reform: New 7-inch Linux laptop launches from US$899
        MNT Research has finally launched the Pocket Reform, roughly 9 months after it presented the mini laptop. As we discussed last June, the MNT Pocket Reform has a 7-inch LCD panel. It now outputs at 1,920 x 1,200 pixels rather than 1080p, though. Additionally, the MNT Pocket Reform has 8 GB of DDR4 RAM and 128 GB of eMMC flash storage, with a MicroSD card reader and an M.2 2280 slot in place for storage expansion.

        Moreover, the mini laptop has an ortho-linear matrix keyboard with 60 Kailh Choc White mechanical switches, N-key rollover and RGB backlighting. Also, the MNT Research has included four mouse buttons and a micro-optical trackball. Meanwhile, the MNT Pocket Reform has an 8,000 mAh combined battery capacity that should last up to 4 hours charges via a built-in USB port.

    • Audiocasts/Shows

      • MakuluLinux Max New Teaser Video !

        Here is a new Teaser Video Showing a little more of what's behind the curtain with Makulu Max...

      • The BSD Now Podcast ☛ BSD Now 498: Dropping Privileges

        OpenZFS auditing for storage Performance, Privilege drop; privilege separation; and restricted-service operating mode in OpenBSD, OPNsense 23.1.1 release, Cloning a System with Ansible, FOSDEM 2023, BSDCan 2023 Travel Grants

      • Tux Digital ☛ Linux Out Loud 54: More Storage Please

        This week, Linux Out Loud chats about how much space do you need. Welcome to episode 54 of Linux Out Loud. We fired up our mics, connected those headphones as we searched the community for themes to expound upon.

    • Applications

    • Instructionals/Technical

      • Dignited ☛ Plex Media Server: Your Ultimate Guide to organizing and watching your personal Media
      • Dusty Mabe: NetworkManager: Limiting Bond Subordinate devices by MAC Address

        Someone recently asked me about locking down a bond to specific NIC devices within the machine. Specifically they were concerned with the sometimes unpredictable nature of NIC naming in Linux.

      • TecAdmin ☛ Sed – Uncommenting Lines in a Text File

        Sed, short for "stream editor", is a powerful text-processing tool that is commonly used in Linux and Unix systems. It can perform a wide range of operations on text files, including searching, replacing, inserting, and deleting lines. One common task that users often need to perform with Sed is uncommenting lines in a text file.

      • Linuxiac ☛ How to Install Java on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS

        Are you looking to install Java on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS? Our step-by-step guide will walk you through the process with ease.
      • Red Hat Official ☛ How to cache Ansible facts with MongoDB
      • Red Hat Official ☛ Create a libvirt network with Open vSwitch

        libvirt's default Linux bridge imposes limitations with some advanced network features. Try using OVS to implement libvirt networks instead.

      • UNIX Cop ☛ How to Enable and Disable Root on Ubuntu?

        On Linux, you need to know when the root account is enabled or disabled. Well, today you will learn how to enable and disable it in Ubuntu 22.04 Although short, this post can help you on more than one occasion.

      • TecAdmin ☛ Bash Special Variables ($0, $?, $#, $@, $$, $*)

        Bash is a powerful shell that provides a wide range of special variables that can be used to manipulate and control the behavior of scripts.

      • Linux Capable ☛ How to Install VidCutter on Ubuntu 22.04 or 20.04

        VidCutter is a free, open-source video editing software for Linux-based operating systems. It is a lightweight, easy-to-use video editing tool with basic and advanced editing features. VidCutter allows you to cut easily, split, and merge video files. Additionally, you can add text overlays, image overlays, and audio tracks to your videos.

      • Linux Capable ☛ How to List Users in Linux Command Terminal

        Managing user groups is a critical aspect of Linux system administration, as it is essential to ensure security and control access to resources. There are several ways to list user groups in Linux, and this article explores some of the most common and effective methods.

      • Linux Capable ☛ How to Delete a User in Linux Command Terminal

        Linux is a powerful and adaptable operating system that delivers many features for managing user accounts. In this article, we provide a detailed guide on how to delete a user in Linux using different command-line utilities.

      • Linux Capable ☛ How to Install DNF Automatic on Fedora Linux

        DNF Automatic is a CLI tool that is designed to upgrade packages on a Linux system.

      • Linux Capable ☛ How to Install OpenJDK 11 on Ubuntu 22.04 or 20.04

        OpenJDK 11 is a free, open-source implementation of the Java SE 11 Platform, which includes the Java Development Kit (JDK) and Java Runtime Environment (JRE).

      • Linux Capable ☛ How to Install Android Studio on Ubuntu 22.04 or 20.04

        Android Studio is a popular Integrated Development Environment (IDE) designed for developing Android applications. It was developed and released by Google in 2013 as a replacement for Eclipse, which was previously used as the primary IDE for Android app development.

      • peppe8o ☛ NPK Soil Sensor with Arduino: Wiring Diagram and Code Explained

        In this tutorial, we will use Arduino, an NPK soil sensor to get the soil fertility. The percentage of nitrogen, Phosphorus and Potassium is measured

      • Linux IT ☛ Emanuele Rocca: Disposable Debian VMs with debvm

        Some notes on using debvm, an amazing piece of software I’ve started using only recently.

        Create a new virtual machine:

        $ debvm-create

        You now have a virtual machine with Debian Sid of your host native architecture (probably amd64). The image file is called rootfs.ext4. You’ve got 1G of disk space in the VM.

        You can now just run the VM! You will be automatically logged is as root.

        $ debvm-run

        Experiment in the VM, run all the sort of tests you have in mind. For example, one thing I commonly do is verifying that things work in a clean environment, as opposed to "on my machine".

      • Thomas Koch: Know your tools - simple backup with rsync

        I’ve been using rsync for years and still did not know its full powers. I just wanted a quick and

        dirty simple backup but realised that rsnapshot is not in Debian anymore.

        However you can do much of rsnapshot with rsync alone nowadays.

    • Games

      • Tom's Hardware ☛ Steam Deck Goes on Sale for the First Time

        The Steam Deck is getting its first sale, with 10% off as part of the Steam Spring Sale.

      • CubicleNate ☛ RAD Expansion Unit for the Commodore 64

        For anyone that has known anything about “CubicleNate” for any period of time will know that I am a huge fan of all things Commodore 64. Maybe not everything but most things, I absolutely am. I am also a fan of open source and the communities that have developed around it.

  • Distributions and Operating Systems

    • SUSE/OpenSUSE

    • Fedora Family / IBM

      • Fedora Project ☛ Fedora Community Blog: How to rebase to Fedora Silverblue 38 Beta

        Silverblue is an operating system for your desktop built on Fedora Linux. It’s excellent for daily use, development, and container-based workflows. It offers numerous advantages such as being able to roll back in case of any problems. Let’s see the steps to upgrade to the newly released Fedora 38 Beta, and how to revert if anything unforeseen happens.

      • Scott Williams (vwbusguy): Fedora at SoCal Linux Expo 20x

        Fedora at SoCal Linux Expo 20x

        The So Cal Linux Expo again returned to Pasadena, CA and Fedora came back as an exhibitor!€  I have now attended SCaLE every year since 2010, shortly after I moved to Calfornia.€  Since the last SCaLE was in late July, there was less time between them.€  As a result, I noticed a few things that contributed to this year's SCaLE being an especially special year: Many larger corporate vendors who were at SCaLE last year didn't come back this year, so it felt like there were more hobbyist and community groups to fill in the space.€  At the same time, many who had not been travelling due to COVID returned for the first time in years.€  It resulted in SCaLE feeling a bit more geniune this year with a crowd of people who largely knew what Linux and open source are about and were excited to be there.

      • Enterprisers Project ☛ 3 ways layoffs will impact IT jobs in 2023
      • Red Hat Official ☛ Storing sensitive data using Podman secrets: Which method should you use?

        Podman supports two ways for storing sensitive data: using raw Podman secrets or creating Kubernetes secrets using Podman.

      • Remi Collet ☛ Remi Collet: PHP version 8.1.17 and 8.2.4

        RPMs of PHP version 8.2.4 are available in remi-modular repository for€ Fedora ≥ 36 and Enterprise Linux ≥ 8 (RHEL, Alma, CentOS, Rocky...) and in remi-php82 repository for EL 7.

        RPMs of PHP version 8.1.17 are available in remi-modular repository for€ Fedora ≥ 36 and Enterprise Linux ≥ 8 (RHEL, Alma, CentOS, Rocky...) and in remi-php81 repository for EL 7.

        The modules for EL-9 are available for x86_64 and aarch64.

      • Make Tech Easier ☛ Grub vs. Systemd-boot: Which One Should You Use as the Bootloader

        Systemd-boot, previously called "gummiboot" is Grub's newer competitor. On compatible EFI systems, you can use systemd-boot in place of Grub to boot the system's operating system. From a high-level perspective, systemd-boot links to the bootloader already in UEFI, offering the most basic feature set for selecting an operating system.

      • Fedora Magazine ☛ Fedora Magazine: Test GitHub projects with GitHub Actions and Testing Farm [Ed: Fedora Magazine is promoting Microsoft's proprietary software]
  • Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

  • Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

  • Leftovers

  • Gemini* and Gopher

    • Personal

      • 🔤SpellBinding: GILNOUV Wordo: DEFUN
      • Edan's Capsule - Levellers Gig

        Well, tonight I went to a Levellers gig in Newcastle-Upon-Tyne and I have to say, it was pretty fucking awesome.

      • Stopping Short of the Infinity

        Though not related directly to this quote, what comes to mind is tangential. Tangential ideas toot my muffin. They enhance the darkness that extends from the membrane surrounding this house into the vast cosmos, stopping just short of the infinity peering back and sizing up said membrane, pining for its dissolution.

        I get intermittent lectures from my mother about *tipping*. I'm not against tipping itself. I've been known to throw money around practically at random at times. However, I certainly have problems with *tipping culture* in the good ol' USA. And how does *tipping culture* in the good ol' USA relate to Woodbury's Soap?

      • Fundamental Limitations

        So in gemini there is a 1024 byte limitation on the URL; this is by design. Softwares can have a fixed buffer, and you'll know whether some micro device (presumably with hairball SSL handled, elsewhere) will be able to deal with the protocol, or not. If there were no limitation (there still is one) that would rule out many smaller devices that either cannot allocate sufficient memory, or where the processing would become too slow. Some will argue that the modern web had already become too slow.

      • globalism in action

        today at a café i saw a grinder of "Pink Himalayan Salt" (it's that sort of café). on the front of the label was the brand name "LITALY" with an italian slogan beneath.

    • Technical

      • How artificial intelligence builds ultimate police state

        Twenty years ago, the United States government still reeling from the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, began scaling up its surveillance capacity. There was "Total Information Awareness." There was even a controversial plan to enlist letter carriers and even librarians to keep an eye on the populace.

        Back then, I found this to be somewhat laughable. Even if the U.S. government was able to scoop up all sorts of information off the Internet and telephones, it will represent a massive trove of data that no humans could go through and analyze. Even if the Intelligence Community enlisted the entire population of the United States that would be humanly impossible. So my reaction to this was, what could they do?

      • Setting up vits-models to generate Waifu voices on demand

        I got my hands on LLaMA and I'm trying to build an automatic translation bot and throw it into VRChat for assist in language exchange (credit to my friend Pichu for the idea). Thinking about it. Why not make the voice as quite as possible? It fits the weeb colture there. The standard TTS tools, even Festival can only do standard, boring speech. After a few seconds googling, I found a plethora of deep learning based voice synthesis models on HuggingFace. vits-models have a huge collection of voices.

      • Minimalist Computing

        I've spent the last couple of months familiarizing myself more with Gopher and exploring gopherspace. This is in addition to Geminispace. I have such a calming sense of peace when I'm exploring gopherspace without the inundation with ads or video or photos that so prevalent on the modern web. I haven't had the luxury of exploring as much as I want do since my computer is no longer my own un-shared private system any longer after a series of hardware failures and accidents with other household devices, so for the moment I am forced to share my computer and I loathe it. Work continues on my tutorials but due to the shared computer in addition to other factors it is taking much longer that anticipated. I remain hopeful that I will have my computer back to only my individual use again within the next two months.

        I don't think I've explored enough to do a apples to oranges comparison of gopher vs gemini but I have been reading up on many others' thoughts on the subject. I do know for sure however that I prefer Gemini's requirement for SSL encrypted connections. I understand that the way that Gemini gemtext is written, the display of the content is solely determined by the client, but I do know that I really prefer the old "look and feel" of the gopher way of doing things with text being plain text only file, hard wrapped to 72 characters and left justified. It reminds me of a RFC text file and I love that format and look much more than the HTML versions.

      • Internet/Gemini

        • Maiden Voyage

          So I've left smol.pub, ditched my old pseudonym, Sud0nim, and adopted a new one, Lesogorov.

          [...]

          Sud0nim, wasn't doing it for me anymore. I came up with it in 2020 and had been using it since then, but I didn't feel ever truly tied to it. I thought it was a fun play on the word "pseudonym", while incorporating my interest in Linux with the "sudo" command. It also didn't have any ties to any identifying information to make it fairly anonymous. Pretty quickly I realized I was far from the first person to select that as my online handle, which resulted in me needing to make it "Sud0nim" or "Sudon1m" or "Sud0n1m", which just pushed me further away from the name. Plus when I wrote my piece on the struggles of being anonymous online, I got a very reassuring email from Ploum that reassured me not to worry so much about being tied to my online identity. This diminished my liking of the whole pseudo-anonymous aspect to the name. So when I decided to spin up my own Gemini server, I got the domain sud0nim.online and got it all ready for publishing, but stopped and started from scratch. If I wanted to put work into this it ought to be a name I feel tied to. I chose "Lesogorov" a Russian patronymic for "Son of the forested mountains", it's not a very common last name in Russia so it's unique enough for me, and it represents my interest and connection to nature, especially mountains and thick forest. Plus it reflects my interest in Russian culture and the language, and in Russian cursive it is easy to distinguish each letter, which can't be said of all names/words.

      • Programming

        • R code for calculating woody productivity and vital rates

          I have developed some R code to use with data from the SEOSAW[1] database to calculate woody productivity and vital rates according to Talbot et al. (2014), Kohyama et al. (2018) and Kohyama et al. (2019). I've archived the code as a Github repository[2] in case anybody wants to use it.

        • Using Nix to configure Neovim

          Over the past week I've been experimenting with using Nix to configure NeoVim, and its been going really well. I've been playing with using Nix as a package manager since the beginning of the new year when I bought a new machine, and its been an absolute breeze with installing new command line tools. However, by installing NeoVim via Nix, it wasn't then picking up my rc files. Couple that with the fact that I've been putting off migrating to NeoVim's built-in package manager to manage all my packages because it would drastically increase the number of steps required to set up a new machine, and I thought it would be worth investigating whether I could using Nix to configure NeoVim entirely. I use quite a few different tools and so this became quite a complex process, but I've got something I'm pretty happy with and picking it all up on my work machine was a simple case of pulling my dotfiles repo[1] and running `nix-shell` -- simply brilliant.


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



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