This week we’ve been switching to Brave and KDE. We discuss what Alan’s birthday present could be and go over all your wonderful feedback.
It’s Season 14 Episode 04 of the Ubuntu Podcast! Alan Pope, Mark Johnson and Martin Wimpress are connected and speaking to your brain.
FreeBSD Network Troubleshooting, The State of FreeBSD, dhcpleased, bhyve for Calamares Development, EFS automount and ebsnvme-id, Old Usenix pictures, and more.
Stuart Langridge, Jono Bacon, and Jeremy Garcia present Bad Voltage, in which flock is more than wallpaper, we say the word “cohort” about fifty billion times
Intel's open-source "ANV" Vulkan driver now supports the Vulkan EXT_conservative_rasterization extension that is most notably used by DXVK for translating Direct3D atop this graphics API and work is also pending too for VKD3D.
The conservative rasterization extension was introduced back in Vulkan 1.0.67 from early 2018. The conservative rasterization mode allows for over or under estimation for limiting the rasterization process and ensuring certainty over the rendering behavior.
The past several weeks have seen a few rounds of Intel graphics driver changes sent in to DRM-Next ahead of the Linux 5.13 cycle. This Linux 5.13 Intel graphics driver work has included Alder Lake S enablement and other feature changes. A final batch of "feature" work was sent out this morning for targeting the Intel kernel graphics driver in Linux 5.13.
This final patch of Intel i915 kernel graphics driver changes for targeting Linux 5.13 is "a pull request of refactoring both to clean up and prepare for future."
Intel's open-source developers have released a new version of IGC, the Intel Graphics Compiler that is used by their open-source Linux compute stack, recently was transitioned for use by their Windows driver too, and might eventually be piped into their Mesa OpenGL/Vulkan drivers.
We haven't heard anything or seen any new code over the past quarter for integrating IGC into Mesa, so it's not clear where those plans stand at the moment. But in any case this open-source graphics compiler remains central to their Linux compute stack for OpenCL and oneAPI Level Zero. IGC 1.0.6748 was released this week as their latest tagged version.
I was recently interviewed by Boiling Steam, a small Linux gaming-oriented news site focused on creating original content and interviewing only the most important figures within the community (like me). If you’ve ever wanted to know more about the rich open source pedigree of Super Good Code, the interview goes deep into the back catalogue of how things got to this point.
Last time, I talked a bit about descriptors 3.0: lazy descriptors. The idea I settled on here was to do templated updates, and to do the absolute minimal amount of work possible for each draw while still never reusing any written-to descriptor sets once they’d been cycled out.
Lazy descriptors worked out great, and I’m sure many of you have grown to enjoy the ZINK: USING LAZY DESCRIPTORS log message that got spammed on startup over the past couple months of zink-wip.
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The goal of zink-wip is to provide an optimal testing environment with the absolute bleeding edge in terms of performance and features. The auto mode should provide that, and the cases I’ve seen where its performance is noticeably worse number exactly one, and it’s a subtest for drawoverhead. If anyone finds any other cases where auto is worse than lazy, I’m interested, but it shouldn’t be a concern.
With that said, it might be worth doing some benchmarking between the two for some extremely high CPU usage scenarios, as that’s the only case where it may be possible to detect a difference. Gone are the days of zink(-wip) hogging the whole CPU, so probably this is just useless pontificating to fill more of a blog page.
But also, if you’re doing any kind of benchmarking on a high-end CPU, I’d probably recommend going with the lazy mode for now.
gImageReader is a free and open-source PDF reader with the ability to extract text from images and PDFs. It is built as a simple Gtk/Qt front-end to Tesseract-OCR, an open-source OCR engine for recognizing texts and patterns in documents and images using Artificial Intelligence.
On its own, Tesseract is a command-line tool that is restricted to usage by Linux users familiar enough with their terminals. Thanks to gImageReader, everyone can now take advantage of the engine’s OCR efficiency.
gImageReader works by scanning texts from PDF or picture file in any of the several languages that it supports thanks to the existence of Unicode characters. It features a simple, well-organized customizable user interface through which you can carry out spellcheck and translation tasks.
Cockpit is the modern Linux admin interface. We release regularly.
Here are the release notes from Cockpit version 241.
FreeCAD 0.19's migration from Python 2 to Python 3 and Qt4 to Qt5 is complete. This newest major feature release includes updates to its navigation cube, dynamic properties, backup file handling, and more.
FreeCAD 0.19 includes several new features, as well. Icon theme management, a dark stylesheet, a WebGL exporter, Arch Fence, and Arch Truss tools are just a few of the update's new additions.
Want to learn more? Visit the FreeCAD wiki for project updates and to learn how you can contribute.
this simply means: no space left on /boot device (too many old kernels there)
the /boot partition is currently per default only 256MBytes small and fills up fast, when there are no removal of old kernels.
OpenCL (Open Computing Language) is a framework for writing programs that execute across heterogeneous platforms consisting of central processing units (CPUs), graphics processing units (GPUs), digital signal processors (DSPs), field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) and other processors or hardware accelerators.
OpenCL greatly improves the speed and responsiveness of a wide spectrum of applications in numerous market categories including professional creative tools, scientific and medical software, vision processing, and neural network training and inferencing.
The framework defines a language to write “kernels” in. These kernels are the functions which are to run on the different compute devices.
OpenCL is an open standard maintained by the non-profit technology consortium Khronos Group.
Everyone says you should learn Git—and you should—but let's be honest: Git is kind of hard.
Even almost ten years into my software development career, I am still learning about the underlying Git fundamentals and how to use Git more effectively.
It wasn't too long ago that I realized I had a fundamental misunderstanding of a key command I'd used countless times.
Like many other areas in programming, I believe the best way to learn is to just start doing.
This tutorial will be helpful for beginners to install LibreOffice 7.1.2 on Ubuntu 20.04, Ubuntu 18.04, and LinuxMint 20.1.
LibreOffice released the newer and 2nd version in the 7 series as 7.1.2 and it comes with new features and bug fixes and program enhancements.
All users are requested to update to this version as soon as possible.
Screenly OSE is an, open source, digital sign solution that is purpose built for the Raspberry Pi. This can come in handy in any situation where people gather, business, shop, doctor’s waiting room, a church or a community center to name a few. Screenly OSE isn’t the only solution to accomplish this but it is arguably the best solution to accomplish this, or at the very minimum, the cleanest and best polish option I have ever used.
Bottom Line Up Front: If you have any reason to provide information to people in a commercial, business or community center type situation, this may be a perfect fit for you. If you have any digital pictures and would like to turn a monitor or TV into a picture frame, even home movies, I suppose (that has the potential to be obnoxious), this is a perfect solution for you. If you are looking for a useful, first project, for the Raspberry Pi with substantial application, this is most certainly a perfect project upon which to cut your Single Board Computer teeth.
This is “Front Page Linux” so, number one, you need a Linux machine to start. I use openSUSE so I will gear this, somewhat, in that direction but this will be general enough that you should be able to accomplish this on any distribution.
When it comes to network troubleshooting and monitoring, what types of tools you are using make a world of difference. While required tools may vary depending on the types of network problems you are dealing with, there are a set of essential tools that every network administrator must be familiar with, and tcpdump is definitely one of them.
tcpdump is a command-line tool packet sniffing that allows you to capture network packets based on packet filtering rules, interpret captured packet content, and display the result in a human-readable format. The main power of tcpdump comes from its (1) flexible packet filtering rules and (2) versatile protocol dissection capability. Although GUI-based Wireshark provides equally powerful filtering/dissecting capabilities via a more user-friendly interface, its relatively high memory footprint (for buffering packets) and GUI-based operations make Wireshark unsuitable when you are troubleshooting directly from remote headless servers.
A client asked me to develop a system for “censoring” images from an automatic camera. The situation is that we have a camera taking regular photos from a fixed location which includes part of someone else’s property. So my client made a JPEG with some black rectangles in the sections that need to be covered. The first thing I needed to do was convert the JPEG to a PNG with transparency for the sections that aren’t to be covered.
To convert it I loaded the JPEG in the GIMP and went to the Layer->Transparency->Add Alpha Channel menu to enabled the Alpha channel. Then I selected the “Bucket Fill tool” and used “Mode Erase” and “Fill by Composite” and then clicked on the background (the part of the JPEG that was white) to make it transparent. Then I exported it to PNG.
No matter your use for Linux, be it CentOS or Ubuntu, you will need to manage applications and services. I will cover the ways you can manage your software on a CentOS system, the next article will cover similar management on an Ubuntu system.
A lot of information will be covered in this article, so be sure you understand how it all works individually and together.
Linux users can easily rename files using the mv command. However, the problem arises when you have multiple filenames that you want to rename. Changing the name of every file one by one can be a frustrating task for anyone.
Luckily, there are several ways to batch rename files in Linux. We'll discuss the simplest and the most effective methods of doing the same in the subsequent sections.
This article is part two of three covering encryption concepts and the Internet public key infrastructure (PKI). The first article in this series introduced symmetric and public key (asymmetric) encryption in cryptography. If you're not familiar with the basic concept of public-key encryption, you should read part one before you go ahead with this one.
In this part, I show you the basics of Transport Layer Security and Secure Socket Layer (TLS/SSL), how the Internet PKI works, and OpenSSL, the Swiss Army knife for TLS/SSL tasks. I cover how to use OpenSSL to create key-pairs and to generate a certificate signing request (CSR) to send to your certificate authority (CA) for signing. After that, I discuss some weaknesses of the Internet PKI you should be aware of.
SpiderFoot is an open source intelligence (OSINT) automation tool. It integrates with just about every data source available and utilises a range of methods for data analysis, making that data easy to navigate.
SpiderFoot has an embedded web-server for providing a clean and intuitive web-based interface but can also be used completely via the command-line. It’s written in Python 3 and GPL-licensed.
Lets say you wanted to run a local area network controller web service that was made by a company that you didn’t completely trust, what would be your options? If you wanted proper authenticated+encrypted access to it, you could setup a trustworthy VPN service like OpenVPN and remote into the LAN or you can also setup a reverse https proxy service that handles the TLS channel + basic authentication first before forwarding on the traffic to the internal web service.
I have 500GB SSD installed on my Linux server. My web server is running out of the disk space. I need to find a biggest or largest file concerning file size on the disk. How do I find largest file in a directory recursively using the find command?
To find a big file concerning file size on disk is easy task if you know how to use the find, du and other command. The du command used to estimate file space usage on Linux system. The output of du passed on to the sort and head command using shell pipes. Let us see how to find largest file in Linux server using various commands.
Mosh, which stands for Mobile Shell is a command-line application which is used for connecting to the server from a client computer, over the Internet. It can be used as SSH and contains more feature than Secure Shell.
It is an application similar to SSH, but with additional features. The application is written originally by Keith Winstein for Unix like operating system and released under GNU GPL v3.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install aaPanel on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, aaPanel is also a free and open-source control panel for Linux. It’s easy to install & all the web hosting options are well-categorized for easily managing websites and databases. Also, it is user-friendly and offers GUI for most of the essential Linux services, making your job managing a web server easier.
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 through the step-by-step installation of the aaPanel control panel on Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal Fossa). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 18.04, 16.04, and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint.
In our increasingly digital society, protecting the privacy of sensitive data and our behavior online is a universal concern. Many users switch to Linux for its superior privacy features and the excellent selection of privacy-focused distros that it offers.
Regardless of the OS you are using, encryption is a critical element of digital privacy. In this article, we explore the best and most reliable methods of file encryption on Linux. Our experts have firsthand experience using these programs and understand the technology behind them, equipping us with the knowledge to help you securely encrypt files on your Linux system and avoid common pitfalls associated with Linux file encryption.
This article explains how to enable hardware acceleration in Chromium browser running on Raspberry Pi OS (for Raspberry Pi 4).
By enabling GPU acceleration, the CPU usage should be much lower when playing supported videos (for example on YouTube). In my case, using a Raspberry Pi 4 Model B, the main Chromium gpu and renderer processes went down from ~160% and ~130% to under ~30% and 23% CPU usage (according to htop) after enabling hardware acceleration. As a side note, this is a prerequisite for an article I plan on writing soon.
Ngrok is a cross-platform tool that uses cloud services to expose local networked services behind NATs and firewalls over a secure tunnel. Ngrok can also share local websites, build/test webhook consumers, and self-host personal services. Ngrok was created in 2012 by Alan Shreve (@inconshreveable). It operates a free and a paid version.
In the article How to use Ansible to configure Vim, I developed an Ansible playbook to configure an initial Vim environment using a few Vim plugins. In this current article, I continue building on the previous example by converting the playbook into an Ansible role.
Ansible roles allow you to develop reusable automation components by grouping and encapsulating related automation artifacts, like configuration files, templates, tasks, and handlers. Because roles isolate these components, it's easier to reuse them and share them with other people. You can also make your roles configurable by exposing variables that users can set when calling the role, allowing them to configure their system according to specific requirements.
A year ago, new features in the AWS Systems Manager Session Manager were uncovered by AWS (Amazon Web Services). Now users can directly tunnel Secure Shell (SSH) and Secure Copy (SCP) connections from local clients without needing an AWS management console. Users have relied on firewalls for years to access cloud content safely, but these options have encryption and management overhead issues. Session Manager offers cloud providers stable, audited console connectivity without the need for remote access points. One of the challenges faced by users adopting the AWS Session Manager is avoided by incorporating Secure Copy (SCP) functionality. Cloud asset console access was given inside the AWS management console, but so far, there was not any convenient way to transfer files to remote systems. Creating or maintaining a live system needs copying patches or other data to the live instances in certain cases. Now Session Manager grants this without the need for external solutions like firewalls or intermediate S3 use. Let’s look at the procedure to set up SCP and SSH to use them with enhanced capabilities.
If you use Git every day, you probably make a lot of commits. If you're using Git every day in a project with other people, it's safe to assume that everyone is making lots of commits. Every day. And this means you're aware of how disorienting a Git log can become, with a seemingly eternal scroll of changes and no sign of what's been changed.
So how do you find out what file changed in a specific commit? It's easier than you think.
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The git whatchanged command is a legacy command that predates the log function. Its documentation says you're not meant to use it in favor of git log --raw and implies it's essentially deprecated. However, I still find it a useful shortcut to (mostly) the same output (although merge commits are excluded), and I anticipate creating an alias for it should it ever be removed. If you don't need to merge commits in your log (and you probably don't, if you're only looking to see files that changed), try git whatchanged as an easy mnemonic.
XDP (eXpress Data Path) is a powerful new networking feature in Linux that enables high-performance programmable access to networking packets before they enter the networking stack. But XDP has a high learning curve. Many developers have written introduction blogs for this feature, such as Paolo Abeni’s Achieving high-performance, low-latency networking with XDP: Part I and Toke’s Using the eXpress Data Path (XDP) in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.
XDP is based on extended Berkeley Packet Filter (eBPF) and is still fast-moving. The eBPF/XDP coding format and style are also changing. So developers are creating tools and frameworks to make eBPF and XDP applications easy to write. Two of these resources, the libbpf library and the xdp-tools utilities, are the topics of this article.
This article is Part 7 of the LFCA series, here in this part, you will acquaint yourself with the general system administration commands to manage software packages in the Linux system.
As a systems administrator, you will be tasked with the responsibility of managing software packages. This includes installing, upgrading, and removing or uninstalling packages from your system.
A Pivot Table is a powerful tool for estimating, compiling, and reviewing data to find patterns and trends even easier. Pivot Tables can be used to aggregate, sort, arrange, rearrange, group, total, or average data in a dataset to truly comprehend data associations and dependencies. Using a pivot table as an illustration is the easiest way to demonstrate how this method operates. PostgreSQL 8.3 was launched a few years back, and a new version named ‘tablefunc’ was added. Tablefunc is a component that contains several methods that yield tables (that is, multiple rows). This modification comes with a very cool range of features. The crosstab method, which will be used to create pivot tables, is among them. The crosstab method takes a textual argument: a SQL command that returns raw data in the first layout and returns a table in the subsequent layout.
In the 21st century, we tend to take data storage for granted. We have lots of it, it's relatively affordable, and there are many different types of storage available. No matter how much cloud storage space you're given for free, there's nothing quite like having a physical hard drive for your really important (or really big, when you live on a slow network) data. However, few hard drives are sold right off the shelf, ready to use—in an ideal configuration, at least. Whether you're buying a new drive or setting up a system with a different configuration, you need to know how to partition a drive on Linux.
This article demonstrates GNU Parted, one of the best tools for partitioning drives. If you prefer to use a graphical application instead of a terminal command, read my article on formatting drives for Linux.
In this article, we will take a look at gdu an open-source disk usage analyzer written in go. Gdu is inspired by godu, dua, ncdu, and df.
The gdu tool is created for SSD drives where parallel processing can be utilized. This tool can also work with HDD with less performance compared to SSD drives. You can also check benchmark results. There are many other similar tools and you have to play with gdu first to see if satisfy your needs.
Play the open source remake and expansion of Transport Tycoon Deluxe free with OpenTTD, which is finally available on Steam along with a new update available. This project has been going for a long time now, first releasing in 2004 and with it still under active development it is the ultimate and best way to enjoy the classic along with tons of enhancements to make it feel a bit more modern.
Vivaladev, the indie proprietary game developer behind the upcoming Virtueror strategy game, has announced that a GNU/Linux version of the game will be released on April 1st, 2022. The GNU/Linux version will be priced at $1774.99, slightly higher than the Windows edition of the game which will be priced at $14.99, after research done by Wall Street Bets reveal fundamental different in how supply and demand laws apply to GNU/Linux users.
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The games release is a full year away, so there are not that many details about it as of yet. However, it is possible to learn some things about it. Hackers have already leaked an early versoin of the games source code at github.com/vivaladav/iso-rts and there are also several game-play videos leaked at youtube.com/channel/UCUYD1ElkmiIklQRemVGxarw. We expect more leaks to appear the coming year.
Virtueror has an official website at virtueror.com. It has nothing but a form asking for very personal information such as your e-mail, first name and even last name. You can sign up to what appears to be a e-mail list if you want to follow development. Remember to Salt Your Data! if you do; they do not need anything beyond a working e-mail address to send e-mail updates.
Want to jump in and see how another game is made? Now is another chance! The koi breeding game Koi Farm that released on Steam on February 26 has now released the source code.
In Koi Farm the idea is simple but effective: you breed differently coloured fish to produce entirely new variations, all while collecting them in your book as cards to progress through them. It's small, there's not much depth and yet it's absolutely wonderful.
Albion Online, one of the few popular MMOs that actually supports Linux with a native build continues to grow and they've given a look at some of the latest numbers. Like a lot of developers, they've seen player counts rise during the long COVID-19 pandemic. For Albion Online, this count seem to just keep growing now.
In a fresh news post the team announced that since the March 17 Call to Arms update, they've managed to hit over 140,000 daily average players and they've been recently seeing some of the highest ever numbers for both Twitch and YouTube so it's proving popular for watchers as well as players.
If you love handheld gaming, then there is no shortage of great handheld gaming devices in 2021. From mainline console manufacturers to Android and Windows/Linux device partners, you have quite a few options if you’re looking for a great handheld gaming experience.
Here's something a little different and the type of game we don't cover often - Cute Bite from Hanako Games is an upcoming vampire raising sim where you guide a tiny shrunken vampire back to power.
"In Cute Bite, you guide your Little Mistress to increase her power by controlling her schedule, sending her to various classes and jobs that will raise her skills. Classes are more effective skill boosts, but they cost money, so becoming successful in the workplace is necessary to pay for more training."
Hanako Games have developed several successful games already, with a good history of Linux support including with Magical Diary: Horse Hall, Date Warp, The Confines Of The Crown, Black Closet and Magical Diary: Wolf Hall.
While Linux is praised for its open-source license with a good number of bloatware-exempt and free to use distributions, it’s still not the de facto OS for the best gaming PC, as the majority of the best PC games only run natively on Windows operating systems. Fortunately, Nvidia’s latest GeForce driver isn’t just Rainbow Six Siege getting Reflex and introducing Resizable BAR support on RTX 3000 graphics cards, as there’s a whole lot of love for Linux, too.
Virtual emulators in Linux, such as Wine, already do a pretty good job of emulating Windows-exclusive applications such as Photoshop, but when it comes to running games, getting the best graphics card to play ball with VMs results in a lot of fiddling around and errors.
The latest Nvidia driver for Linux enables GPU passthrough support on Windows virtual machines, which should reduce the number of errors users run into when trying to unofficially set up GPU passthrough on Nvidia cards. Could this make Linux distributions serious contenders for gaming PCs, if performance is up to scratch? Not so fast, as there’s a catch.
I recently started writing a game where you build words using letter tiles. To create the game, I needed to know the frequency of letters across regular words in the English language, so I could present a useful set of letter tiles. Letter frequency is discussed in various places, including on Wikipedia, but I wanted to calculate the letter frequency myself.
We?re happy to announce the availability of the next minor patch release for 2.8. Similar to the previous patch release, this release again contains multiple bug fixes and small new features and improvements only. As usual, the full list of the relevant changes is available in the ChangeLog file, the code and the installers can be found on the dowload page.
We recommend everybody to update to this patch release of 2.8 to benefit from the recent improvements.
All work on the project was finished in march, so all that is left is some minor modifications and writing the project report. I believe that the goals set at the start of the project have been mostly fulfilled: the project does in fact present the information in a clear and beautiful, mobile-friendly way, thanks to the aether-sass theme. It has google-independent search, although it does not use lunar.js as was suggested, and the development news are now in its own section, although the changelogs were left outside of the individual posts for practicality reasons. The screenshots have been updated, but most of them have been removed as we have decided on a simpler homepage which highlights the most important features of the program.
A while ago we have talked to you about our plans to switch to offline updates, in an attempt at making the update experience more reliable.
After some testing we have now rolled out the change to all editions. For further details you can check out the previous blog post. As previously noted, this only affects the out of the box experience when using Plasma’s Discover for updates. Terminal applications and other GUIs are unaffected.
In our various user interfaces, not only in those made by KDE, really pretty much everywhere, we often have situations that cause the user to think something like "hm, did I click that button?" or "is it doing anything?" or perhaps "is it broken?". The way we often deal with that is to immediately slap a spinner on something, if we think it might take a long time, or we just wait for things to happen if we think it might happen kind of soon.
The problem we end up with is, how do we make that choice? Optimally, we'd want to handle the situation where things happen really quickly gracefully, and just not show that spinner. At the same time, we also want to handle the situation where, in some cases, something takes just that little bit longer, and people end up thinking something has broken. The base issue is that it is near impossible to determine how long something is actually going to take before the process has ended, and so we need some way of dealing with that.
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So what we have done now is to actually add this human moment as a base duration unit, called explicitly humanMoment, which we can use in our software. Kirigami already optionally uses this duration of time in its SearchField component, if it has the option turned on to delay firing the automatic accepted signal for situations where the searching thing is expensive (for example if you are doing a search that pulls stuff from online), which also was added for 5.81.
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In short, as of KDE Frameworks 5.81 we will have ourselves a new unit in both Kirigami and Plasma's Unit classes which will tell you a suitable amount of time to wait before showing the user that something is taking a while to happen. Go forth, and enrich our users' experiences by not pestering them about things taking a long time until they're taking a long time, but also before the user gets the impression that it's taking a long time! ;)
Continuing the GTK3 setup, now I present a simple guide to setup GTK4 software development tools with screenshots included the instructions for Fedora and openSUSE operating systems. With this, you can start making desktop applications in C language with the latest version of this infamous widget toolkit that built GNOME. I selected Geany as the code writing tool here. Now rest easy and happy hacking!
We are pleased to offer MX-19.4 for your use.
MX-19.4 is the fourth refresh of our MX-19 release, consisting of bugfixes and application updates since our original release of MX-19. If you are already running MX-19, there is no need to reinstall. Packages are all available thru the regular update channel.
MX Linux 19.4 comes about five months after the MX Linux 19.3 update and introduces support for the long-term supported Linux 5.10 LTS kernel series for better hardware support, along with updated firmware packages, as well as the Mesa 20.3 graphics stack series.
Included in the AHS (Advanced Hardware Support) ISO are Linux kernel 5.10.24 and Mesa 20.3.4 for those who need support for newer hardware or want to use MX Linux for gaming. The AHS ISO image is only supported on 64-bit platforms and comes in two flavors with the Xfce 4.14 and KDE Plasma 5.15 desktop environments.
Now that Debian Linux 11.0 Bullseye is frozen, it won't be long until the final release is announced, so Q4OS 4 Gemini testing branch is approaching the final contours too. The new Q4OS Gemini 4.4 release features Linux kernel 5.10 and Plasma desktop environment 5.20 by default. Trinity desktop environment version 14.0.10 is ready for installation using the Desktop profiler tool. Debian Bullseye packages has been received in their latest versions, Q4OS specific packages has been updated as well.
Feel free to download live media for 64bit computers from the dedicated Testing releases site. Q4OS 4 Gemini will be in development until Debian Bullseye becomes stable, and it will be supported at least five years from the official release date.
In this video, I am going to show an overview of AlmaLinux OS 8.3 and some of the applications pre-installed.
Most of the package updates focused on libraries and YaST packages as well as documentation and nmap.
The snapshot from Tuesday, 20210330, updated an enormous amount of YaST translations and minor style adjustments and improvements were made with the yast2-theme 4.3.8 update. Extra validations were added to yast2-storage-ng 4.3.50 when creating a striped volume and when editing the physical volumes. The update to the 4.3.63 version of yast2-network brought about a dozen improvements to include adding support to write bridge and bonding configurations. Abstraction library libyui removed a dependency on Xlib and has a new packaging system in the update to 4.1.2. Network scanner nmap fixed a MySQL library that was not properly parsing responses in version 7.91 and the update of purple-lurch, which does secure multi-client end-to-end encryption, had some memory handling improvements in the 0.7.0 version update.
Topping the list of package updates for snapshot 20210329 was an update of setools 4.4.0 that added a configuration file driven analysis tool and Xfce file manager thunar 4.16.6 removed a dialog box and revamped documentation across components. A memory leak and an integer overflow fix was made in the update of checkpolicy 3.2. File system utility e2fsprogs 1.46.2 fixed warnings when resizing small file systems to a super-large ones. Spell checking library enchant 2.2.15 had some minor build system improvements and requires nuspell 4.1.0 or greater. Other packages that received updates were ffmpeg-4 4.3.2, perl-Net-HTTP 6.21, man-pages 5.11, rubygem-rspec-rails 5.0.1 and more.
We are pleased to announce that Red Hat Satellite 6.8.5 is generally available as of April 1, 2021.
Red Hat Satellite is part of the Red Hat Smart Management subscription that makes it easier for enterprises to manage patching, provisioning, and subscription management of Red Hat Enterprise Linux infrastructure.
Customers who have already upgraded to Satellite 6.8 should follow the instructions in the errata. Customers who are on versions of Satellite prior to 6.8 should refer to the Upgrading and Updating Red Hat Satellite Guide. You may also want to consider using the Satellite Upgrade Helper if moving from Satellite 6.x to Satellite 6.8.
Xinuos is known for their open-source operating systems (OpenServer) tailored for enterprises.
Out of the blue, it looks like they filed a copyright infringement and antitrust lawsuit against IBM and Red Hat in the United States District Court of the Virgin Islands, St. Thomas and St. John Division.
Xinuos alleges that IBM illegally copied its server operating system’s source code and engaged with Red Hat to proceed with anti-competitive behavior in the industry.
A longstanding dispute over Unix copyright infringement has come back to haunt IBM and Red Hat.
Xinuos, the current owner of UnixWare and OpenServer, has filed a lawsuit claiming that IBM and Red Hat, using wrongfully copied software code, have engaged in additional, illegal anti-competitive misconduct to corner the billion-dollar market for Unix and Linux server operating systems.
Sean Snyder, president and CEO of Xinuos, described the copyright infringement as having a wider remit than intellectual property theft. “It’s also about market manipulation that has harmed consumers, competitors, the open-source community and innovation itself,” he said.
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The plan was to work with IBM to develop an operating system for modern 64-bit hardware architectures that would allow applications originally created for 32-bit architectures to continue to function, and to include modern features for complex enterprise applications. According to the court papers, Project Monterey gave IBM confidential access to the operating system code owned by Xinuos.
Here's a video of the AlmaLinux release event this past Tuesday (March 30th). If you look real hard, I made the "We Are AlmaLinux" montage at the beginning. :)
Its creator, CloudLinux, built the distribution at warp speed, racing to fill the void left by Red Hat's EOL announcement for CentOS.
AlmaLinux OS, which was developed as a free CentOS replacement following Red Hat’s decision to shift focus from CentOS Linux to CentOS Stream is now available for download and use. According to the announcement, you can use AlmaLinux “for any general purpose computing need, in bare-metal installations, in virtual machines, in containers, on cloud providers,” and ARM support is in the works.
We are very happy to announce that today we are releasing the first AlmaLinux OS stable version. That's right, you can go right ahead and download the stable version and use it everywhere you need a stable, reliable, Linux distribution. For some time now we also have the conversion script in our GitHub repository, so you can also convert your system to AlmaLinux OS stable using it if you don't feel like reinstalling from scratch.
AlmaLinux OS, the forever-free open source enterprise-grade Linux is ready.
If you've been following us on Reddit or on our other social media outlets, you also know we had a live launch party just now. We talked to some of our community, industry partners and team members. You can find the link for the recorded version shortly in here.
Peer review platforms are becoming increasingly important to buyers when making IT purchasing decisions. This blog will cover the reviews customers have been giving Oracle Linux on the Gartner Peer Insights.
Almost everyone is familiar with Gartner. Gartner is a world leading research and advisory company, trusted industry-wide to provide fair vendor evaluations through their published research and advisory services.
Additionally, a few years back, Gartner began to offer Gartner Peer Insights. This online forum allows verified customers to write anonymous and candid reviews about their product experiences. Available online, reviews can be easily accessed and read, facilitating the customer-to-customer reference vetting component commonplace for most major IT purchases.
Oracle Linux is one of the many products a customer can evaluate on Gartner Peer Insights. Our team is excited to share that Oracle Linux has received largely positive reviews!*
One recent reviewer described it as “The Ultimate platform.” They go on to share: “The best things I like about it are performance and stability. I can get maximum performance with the least amount of effort and stability wise, I have never had a crash, I am yet to have one. Even when you have situations that may cause problems with other OS or other variants, Oracle enterprise Linux seems to do a better job of catching and handling those exceptions.”
In this week’s Training Tuesday blog, we present a set of free, short videos on networking topics related to your Linux cloud instances. These videos demonstrate how to build and administer virtual networks and gateways in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and how to manage your Linux cloud instance network interfaces.
While Fedora 34 isn't releasing until the end of April or so, there is already feature planning that has continued for Fedora 35 that will come in the autumn.
The latest proposal for Fedora 35 is to make use of the in-development RPM 4.17.
RPM 4.17 for Fedora 35's package management needs will provide more robust RPM install failure handling, macro improvements and better Lua integration, API enhancements, better documentation, and a variety of other improvements. RPM 4.17 is looking to be another big improvement for their package management needs and the tentative list of changes is laid out on RPM.org.
In the first quarter of 2019, we officially moved the Ask Fedora user support web site to Discourse. You can read more about the migration on the Ask Fedora Retrospective – 2019 published last year.
Any developer knows that when we talk about integration, we can mean many different concepts and architecture components. Integration can start with the API gateway and extend to events, data transfer, data transformation, and so on. It is easy to lose sight of what technologies are available to help you solve various business problems. Red Hat Integration‘s Q1 release introduces a new feature that targets this challenge: the Red Hat Integration Operator.
The Red Hat Integration Operator helps developers easily explore and discover components available in Red Hat OpenShift. One single Operator is now the entry point for getting the latest Red Hat Integration components. The Operator declaratively manages the components we want to enable, the namespaces to which we want to deploy, and their scope in the Red Hat OpenShift cluster using a Kubernetes custom resource.
Deepin is one of the most beautiful Linux distributions based on Debian’s stable branch. The new release version, Deepin 20 comes with the latest Linux kernels 5.10 and 5.11 along with performance improvements, application updates, and other features.
Let’s take a look at some of the major changes in this release of Deepin Linux distribution.
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Besides, this release of Deepin uses the Debian 10.8 stable repository by default. The developers also did some work on the performance as it is now optimized for faster and smoother performance.
Coming to the Desktop, the extend mode of multi-display supports setting the main screen, sub-screen, and gather windows. Also, new shortcuts for multi-display, including OSD switching / Gsetting configuration are included.
Deepin, a beautiful Linux distribution based on Debian stable, released version 20.2 a day ago.
Deepin 20.2 features the LTS Kernel 5.10 and stable Kernel 5.11. In Grub boot menu, you can select to boot either Kernel as you want.
The new release now integrates the Debian 10.8 stable package repository. Thanks to code optimization, you will get less memory occupation for core apps, faster response, enhanced system performance, and smoother user experiences.
Also, Deepin 20.2 introduced a Downloader app with multiple download protocols support, including HTTP(s), FTP(s), BT, magnet link, etc. And the downloads are extremely fast.
This was my 27th month of active contributing to Debian. I became a DM in late March 2019 and a DD on Christmas ‘19! \o/
This month was a bit exhausting; lots of moving parts. With the financial year ending, it was even more crazy, with me running around to banks, CA, et al.
This month I didn't have any particular focus. I just worked on issues in my info bubble.
By all accounts, Freexian is still a small company which relies largely on me in many aspects. The growth of its business is however providing enough financial margin to allow looking into ways to recruit external help, be it through direct hiring (for French residents) or via long term contracting (for people based in other countries).
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But if we can manage to make a positive impact on Debian through the funding that Freexian brings, then I’m interested to grow the company so that we can pay more people to work on Debian. That growth likely would have to go through some more active sales work. At the same time, it is an opportunity for me to delegate (some of) the administrative work that lies solely on my shoulders (invoicing, day to day customer relationship, etc.).
Windows 7 and Windows 10 aren't terrible operating systems. In fact, they are both very good. With that said, the newest version of Windows 10 has many bugs. Unfortunately, since Windows 7 is no longer supported, its users have a very hard decision to make. They have to decide whether to use an unsupported Windows 7 or upgrade to Windows 10 that is full of telemetry and other "spying" that passes their information to Microsoft's servers. That is a very difficult decision.
Thankfully, there is an arguably better option -- just switch to Linux! Yes, modern Linux-based operating systems will be supported (unlike the now-obsolete Windows 7) and most will run great on aging hardware (unlike Windows 10). Linux Lite, which uses the Xfce desktop environment, is one of the best Linux distributions for Windows-switchers, as it is lightweight, modern, and familiar.
Linux Lite 5.4 is the third release in Series 5.x. It is now available for download and installation with full UEFI support.
Linux Lite is a Linux distribution, based on Ubuntu and follows Ubuntu’s Long Term Support (LTS) release cycle. It offers a lightweight desktop experience with a customized Xfce desktop environment. The distro is very beginner-friendly. It was created to make the transition from Windows to a Linux-based operating system as smooth as possible.
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Linux Lite is a Linux distribution, based on Ubuntu and follows Ubuntu’s Long Term Support (LTS) release cycle. It offers a lightweight desktop experience with a customized Xfce desktop environment. The distro is very beginner-friendly. It was created to make the transition from Windows to a Linux-based operating system as smooth as possible.
Linux Mint team designed a notification system which acts as a gentle and welcome reminder regarding updates and took great care not to turn it into an annoyance.
The Mint team did a research and figured out that many causal users recognize the importance of applying the updates, but since the OS doesn’t require them, they used to omit the update installation.
Statistics showed that Linux Mint users are often running outdated software, which could be no longer supported. Even worse, it could contain exploitable vulnerabilities. To remedy the issue, a new pop-up has been created which lets the user know how many updates are available. It says also why updates need to be applied and lets users view available updates. In addition to, it gives users the option to turn on automatic updates.
To tackle these issues in 2008, another communication protocol was introduced called Wayland. This protocol serves between the display server and the client. Wayland also serves as window manager and display server that uses Wayland is also known as Wayland compositor.
Since Wayland is termed superior and the latest protocol, we must be aware of the key differences between Wayland and X.
Ubuntu introduced Wayland back in 2017 with its 17.10 release but then discontinued in 18.04 because of technical and compatibility issues.
The Ubuntu developers unveiled that Ubuntu 21.04 has decided to switch towards the Wayland display server enabled by default. They are considering it over X because Wayland is a much more secure and modern protocol.
Ubuntu 21.04 Beta is here to give us an early taste of the new features and improvements Canonical planned for the next major release of the popular Linux distro. These include the latest Linux 5.11 kernel series, Wayland by default on most configurations, PipeWire support, and nftables as default backend for the firewall.
While it sticks to the GNOME 3.38 desktop environment series, Ubuntu 21.04 comes with many updated apps from the latest GNOME 40 stack. In addition, it now features support for smartcard authentication, improved AD (Active Directory) integration, and the ability to change the power profile from settings.
NVIDIA GTC is back again and we’re thrilled to be talking all things Kubernetes with you, on April 12-16! This year too, the conference will be hosted virtually and registration is free, which means even more of us can get together to share knowledge and ideas at the #1 AI conference and workshop!
Ubuntu and Canonical will be hosting two original GTC sessions, centered around Kubernetes. Whether you’re interested in Kubernetes on workstations, to cloud(s), or the edge, we’ll be showing you how Canonical’s work around MicroK8s and micro-clouds can make Kubernetes simpler for you.
Today, Ceph upstream released the first stable version of ‘Pacific’, a full year after the last stable release ‘Octopus’. Pacific focuses on usability and cross-platform integrations, with exciting features such as iSCSI and NFS promoted to stable or major dashboard enhancements. This makes it easier to integrate, operate and monitor Ceph as a unified storage system. Ceph packages are built for Ubuntu 20.04 LTS and Ubuntu 21.04 to ensure a uniform experience across clouds.
You can try the Ceph Pacific beta by following these instructions, and your deployment will automatically upgrade to the final release as soon as it’s made available from Canonical.
The Ubuntu team announced the release date and the development cycle for Ubuntu 21.04 Hirsute Hippo.Ubuntu 21.04 is due for release on April 22, 2021.
Man, it’s been a while!
Firstly, hey, how are you doing? 2020 has been notably tough on all of us in different ways. Most of us were either stuck indoors or uncomfortably out and about for most of last year. It affected every industry, company, and project in a different way. Given that LineageOS has developers spanning the globe, our contributors all felt last year to varying extents - but what is a community if not to be there for its members, and give them something to spend all that time stuck inside working on .
With that said, we have been working extremely hard since Android 11’s release last August to port our features to this new version of Android. Thanks to our hard work adapting to Google’s fairly large changes in Android 10, we were able to rebase our changes onto Android 11 much more efficiently. This led to a lot of time to spend on cool new features!
As always, let’s talk about versioning conventions - you may be thinking “Shouldn’t this be 18.0, as AOSP is on 11, and not 11.1?”. As we stated in our last blog post, after 17.0, whenever we conduct a platform wide rebase, we will be incrementing our minor version. So, when we rebased on the December Android Security Bulletin (ASB) due to its fairly massive changes, LineageOS 18.1 was born.
Version 18.1 of LineageOS, the Android-based distribution once known as Cyanogen, is available.
Your new cyberdeck has arrived, madam. The Pro€¹ X is a handsome smartphone that runs a variety of free operating systems and has a slide-out keyboard, perfect for SSHing in, NMAPping corpo headquarters, or raiding ATMs in the early 1990s.
LibreOffice 7.1.2 Community, the second minor release of the LibreOffice 7.1 family, targeted at technology enthusiasts and power users, is available for download from https://www.libreoffice.org/download/. LibreOffice 7.1.2 includes over 60 bug fixes and improvements to document compatibility.
For enterprise-class deployments, TDF strongly recommends the LibreOffice Enterprise family of applications from ecosystem partners, with long-term support options, professional assistance, custom features and Service Level Agreements: https://www.libreoffice.org/download/libreoffice-in-business/
LibreOffice Community and the LibreOffice Enterprise family of products are based on the LibreOffice Technology platform, the result of years of development efforts with the objective of providing a state of the art office suite not only for the desktop but also for mobile and the cloud.
Products based on LibreOffice Technology are available for major desktop operating systems (Windows, macOS, Linux and Chrome OS), mobile platforms (Android and iOS) and the cloud. They may have a different name, according to each company brand strategy, but they share the same LibreOffice unique advantages, robustness and flexibility.
We started FreeDOS in 1994. A little history helps here. I grew up with computers. We had an Apple II in our classroom at school, and my brother and I became interested in computers that way. I taught myself BASIC programming by reading books and making my own experiments. I liked to write little games and math puzzles.
Later, we upgraded to an IBM PC, and that was where I first learned DOS. I thought DOS was a much more powerful environment. Even though the command line was still primitive, I learned how to use the different commands on the system to get around and manage files.
Over time, I learned about C programming on DOS, and wrote my own DOS programs. I created more powerful and flexible DOS utilities that replaced the standard DOS commands, and wrote other DOS utilities that enhanced my DOS command line experience.
Google Chrome will soon receive a new feature to boost its security. The said upgrade is known as the DNS-over-HTTPS (DoH), which was previously used by other web browsers.
For the last couple of years, we’ve run the MDN Web Developer Needs Assessment (DNA) Report, which aims to highlight the key issues faced by developers building web sites and applications. This has proved to be an invaluable source of data for browser vendors and other organizations to prioritize improvements to the web platform. This year we did a deep dive into web testing, and we are delighted to be able to announce the publication of this follow-on work, available at our insights.developer.mozilla.org site along with our other Web DNA publications.
First of all, the Mozilla project was officially started on March 31, 1998, which is 23 years ago today. Happy birthday to my favorite "dino" out there! For more background, take a look at my Mozilla History talk from this year's FOSDEM, and/or watch the "Code Rush" documentary that conserved that moment in time so well and also gives nice insight into late-90's Silicon Valley culture.
Now, while Mozilla initially was there to "act as the virtual meeting place for the Mozilla code" as Netscape was still there with the target to win back the browser market that was slipping over to Micosoft. The revolutionary stance to develop a large consumer application in the open along with the marketing of "hack - this technology could fall into the right hands" as well as the general novenly of the open-source movement back then - and last not least a very friendly community (as I could find out myself) made this young project grow fast to be more than a development vehicle for AOL/Netscape, though. And in 2003, a mission to "preserve choice and innovation on the Internet" was set up for the project, shortly after backed by a non-profit Mozilla Foundation, and then with an independently developed Firefox browser, implementing "the idea [...] to design the best web browser for most people" - and starting to take back the web from the stagnation and lack of choice represented by >95% of the landscape being dominated by Microsoft Internet Explorer.
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It all feels like we need someone to unfck the Internet right now more than ever. We need someone to collect info on what's wrong and how it could get better there. We need someone to educate users, companies and politicians alike on where the dangers are and how we can improve the digital space. We need someone who gives us a fast, private and secure alternative to Google's browser and rendering engine that dominates the Internet now, someone to lead us out of the monoculture that threatens to bring innovation to a grind. Someone who has protecting privacy of people as one of their primary principles, and continues work on additional ways of keeping people safe. And that's just the start. As the links on all those points show, Mozilla tries hard to do all that, and more.
I definitely think we badly need a Mozilla that works on all those issues, and we need a whole lot of other projects and people help in the space as well. Be it in advocacy, in communication, in technology (links are just examples), or in other topics.
Can all that actually succeed in improving the Internet? Well, it definitely needs all of us to help, starting with using products like Firefox, supporting organizations like Mozilla, spreading the word, maybe helping to build a community, or even to contribute where we can.
In the past few weeks since the introduction of the EPYC 7003 "Milan" processors there has finally been AMD Zen 3 "Znver3" tuning work that's been hurried into the GCC 11 compiler code-base ahead of its stable release in the coming weeks. That initial Zen 3 tuning work has also now been back-ported to the GCC 10 branch ahead of its next point release.
The past few weeks have seen several commits to GCC Git by SUSE's Jan Hubicka for correcting/completing the Znver3 targeting being introduced in GCC 11, which should be out later this month or early next month depending upon how the rest of the cycle plays out.
LLVM 12.0 was supposed to be out around the end of February but blocker bugs have resulted in additional release candidates as the developers work to button up this open-source compiler stack release.
As most of you are probably aware, Kent Fredric sadly passed away earlier this year: notice from his family, on Facebook.
Kent was a prolific contributor to CPAN and Perl. He released more than 150 distributions of his own to CPAN, but also helped countless other authors and distributions, with bug reports, puil requests, and more.
When a CPAN author dies, their indexing permissions are dropped from PAUSE, and where they had the first-come permission, that will be passed to the pseudo-user ADOPTME. This flags the distribution as being available for adoption.
So as of now, all of Kent's distributions are now available for adoption.
If you look at Kent's author page on MetaCPAN, you'll see 178 distributions (at the time of writing). This means that he was the last person to release those distributions, but in a few cases he didn't have the first-come permission.
When you look at his author page on MetaCPAN, notice the leftmost column, with the blue bars. The bars are an indication of the distribution's position on the CPAN River — a measure of how many other CPAN distributions use that distribution. The more bars, the more dependent distributions. If you hover your mouse pointer over the bars, you'll see the number of dependents.
As you can see, many of Kent's distributions are relied on by other CPAN distributions, and in some cases by thousands. As a result, the PAUSE admins will consider adoption requests carefully, and try to ensure that such distributions are passed into safe hands.
JSON stands for JavaScript Object Notation, which is a format for structuring data that is very similar to the concept of maps in computer programming. Maps consists of keys and corresponding values. A key has to be unique within a map.
JSON is light-weight format of representing data as text in a file, whose syntax is borrowed from the syntax used to create JavaScript Objects. Huge data is converted to JSON format for easy processing in various programming languages and transferring to other nodes. It is most commonly used format for requests and responses while working with API calls.
When you want to write any Java web application, then first understand the Java application server required to run an application. However, it is not easy to select one of the Java application servers as it needs proper knowledge.
Some amazing Java application servers like Eclipse Jetty and Apache Tomcat offer amazing features and support. Still, many people get confused while choosing one of these platforms while working on their Java web application.
Sources from Uber, On Demand Pharmaceuticals and Netlist reflect on how courts and creative clauses can help companies with licence valuation
Sharing personal information on the Internet is never a good idea. You never know how the data will be stored, shared and inevitably abused. That includes personal pictures and video you do not explicitly create for a wide audience.
When Oxford University began work on its covid vaccine, it promised that the resulting work would be patent-free, with an active tech-transfer assistance program so that developing nations could manufacture their own supplies.
That promise was broken. The Gates Foundation pushed the racist lie that poor people can't make safe vaccines – despite world-leading production facilities in the Global South – and convinced the university to sell exclusive rights to Astrazeneca.
Rare diseases kill millions, but because they don't make the headlines that coronavirus does, they're often ignored. Now, the Linux Foundation and the OpenTreatments Foundation are joining forces to create open-source gene therapies for rare genetic diseases.
Security updates have been issued by Debian (underscore), Fedora (busybox, linux-firmware, and xmlgraphics-commons), Oracle (kernel and kernel-container), Slackware (curl and seamonkey), SUSE (firefox and opensc), and Ubuntu (spamassassin).
So if you’re using a self-signed SSL cert which is for personal use but is public facing (similar to an SSH key upon first connect), you will get a scary warning about it of course! It is recommended to verify the cryptographic hash of that certificate to help ensure that there is no Person-In-The-Middle attack taking place. You can have some fun, at least, with self-signed certs because you can put almost anything in them so I wrote a little script to generate some leading 0’s in the fingerprint field.
Well, that was no fun. On March 28, “two malicious commits were pushed to the php-src repo.” That repository, in case you didn’t know, is the PHP language’s master software code storage site. PHP, by the Web Technology Surveys count, by the way, is used by almost 80% of all websites.
Vaughan-Nichols provides details of the attack and discusses ongoing efforts to secure the software supply chain, such as the sigstore project.
Former USPTO Director Andrei Iancu has returned to private practice — back at his Southern California firm Irell & Manella. Iancu had been managing partner of the firm before being nominated by President Trump to lead the Patent Office.
