Welcome to this week's Linux Weekly Roundup. We had a peaceful week in the world of Linux releases with a point release of Manjaro, 21.0.6, and antiX bullseye-beta1.
The premier Linux desktops get some futuristic new features, and we break down the seven-year-old vulnerability in your Linux box revealed this week.
Plus the critical kernel feature that lacks funding, and our take of helloSystem, a FreeBSD-based macOS alternative.
Josh and Kurt talk about why it seems like the world of ransomware has gotten out of control in the last few weeks. Every day there’s some new and more bizarre ransomware story than we had yesterday.
Working out your bad computer habits can be kind of difficult one when simple way to work out where there might be some problems is to simply track what you're doing to go back and analysis the data, one FOSS tool that stores all your data locally called ActivityWatch let's you do this.
Recently, Linus Torvalds had to confront a conspiracy theorist on the Linux kernel mailing list. It seems the rise in popularity of conspiracy theories coincides with the decline of critical thinking. No longer is critical thinking taught in school.
Listener feedback, Fortran, and Ada.
Over the weekend I participated in FOSS Talk Live. Before The Event this would have been an in-person shindig at a pub in London. A bunch of (mostly) UK-based podcasters get together and record live versions of their shows in front of a “studio audience”. It’s mostly an opportunity for a bunch of us middle-aged farts who speak into microphones to get together, have a few beers and chat. Due to The Event, this year it was a virtual affair, done online via YouTube. Joe Ressington typically organised the in-person events, but with a lack of skills in video streaming, Martin Wimpress and Marius Quabeck stepped in to run the show behind-the-scenes.
Nothing particularly special to say about this - rc6 is certainly smaller than rc5 was, so we're moving in the right direction.
It's also not larger (or smaller) than usual for this stage, nor am I aware of any particularly worrying reports, so I think we're all good. The diffstat is nice and flat with a couple of small spikes for a few specific drivers. It all looks very normal and non-threatening, in other words.
Most of the diff by far is drivers (usb, gpu, regulator, rdma, spi, pinctrl, scsi..), with just a few other areas: some x86 fixes (mainly kvm), some RISC-V ones, tiny btrfs and nfs client fixes, a couple of core kernel (scheduler, tracing) fixes.
It's all really pretty small.
Let's hope the trend continues, and we'll have a nice timely 5.13 release. But please do keep testing and verifying,
Linus
After several weeks worth of 5.13-rc releases where there were more changes than Linus Torvalds would like to see, Linux 5.13-rc6 is out now and it's on the smaller side while panning out nicely for this later stage of kernel development.
The 5.13-rc6 kernel prepatch is out for testing. "Nothing particularly special to say about this - rc6 is certainly smaller than rc5 was, so we're moving in the right direction".
In an earlier article I showed how reading from VRAM with the CPU can be very slow. It however turns out there there are ways to make it less slow.
The key to this are instructions with non-temporal hints, in particular VMOVNTDQA. The Intel Instruction Manual says the following about this instruction:
“MOVNTDQA loads a double quadword from the source operand (second operand) to the destination operand (first operand) using a non-temporal hint if the memory source is WC (write combining) memory type. For WC memory type, the nontemporal hint may be implemented by loading a temporary internal buffer with the equivalent of an aligned cache line without filling this data to the cache. Any memory-type aliased lines in the cache will be snooped and flushed. Subsequent MOVNTDQA reads to unread portions of the WC cache line will receive data from the temporary internal buffer if data is available. “ (Intel€® 64 and IA-32 Architectures Software Developer’s Manual Volume 2)
This sounds perfect for our VRAM and WC System Memory buffers as we typically only read 16-bytes per instruction and this allows us to read entire cachelines at time.
It turns out that Mesa already implemented a streaming memcpy using these instructions so all we had to do was throw that into our benchmark and write a corresponding memcpy that does non-temporal stores to benchmark writing to these memory regions.
A while ago I published about Tor and Tor hidden services. As a quick reminder, hidden services are TCP ports exposed into the Tor network using a long .onion address and that doesn't go through an exit node (it never leaves the Tor network).
If you want to browse .onion websites, you should use Tor, but you may not want to use Tor for everything, so here are two solutions to use Tor for specific domains. Note that I use Tor but this method works for any Socks proxy (including ssh dynamic tunneling with ssh -D).
I assume you have tor running and listening on port 127.0.0.1:9050 ready to accept connections.
Wine is a nifty utility that allows users to run Windows applications inside a Linux environment.
In this tutorial I will show you how to setup a basic router and firewall with pfSense. With some practice and reading you could turn later on an advanced router with the firewall capabilities you could need on your network.
pfSense is an special distribution of FreeBSD intented for network routing and firewall and is rapidly becoming the world’s most trusted open source network security solution…. at least they said so, speaking only for me: I trust in this solution.
How do I find out all large files in a directory?
There is no single command that can be used to list all large files. But, with the help of find command command and shell pipes, you can easily list all large files. This page explains how to find the largest files and directories in Linux using various commands.
Transmission and KTorrent are two BitTorrent client programs preinstalled on Ubuntu and Kubuntu operating systems, respectively. These are a kind of the fastest internet program to download anything on earth -- anyone live with them will know. On the other hand, a tracker is a computer in the network which gives every downloading person information about who has the file (seeders) and who else are currently downloading (leechers). Sometimes, as users of either Transmission or KTorrent, we want to add more trackers -- hopefully the best ones -- so we can get even faster download speed. How to do that? Let's learn below.
The Linux set command is a built-in shell command that allows you to display or set both shell and environment variables. In this guide, we cover the set command and demonstrate the various ways that the command-line utility can be used.
How do I install the Redis server on the Ubuntu Linux version 18.04/20.04 LTS server to speed up database caching in memory?
Redis is an open-source distributed, in-memory key-value database, cache, and message broker server. In a similar vein to Memcached but the dataset is non-volatile. The dataset is stored entirely in memory and periodically flushed to disk. Let us see how to install, set up, and configure the Redis server on Ubuntu Linux.
In this video, we are looking at how to install Minetest on Deepin 20.2.
Laravel is one of the best free and open-source frameworks for PHP to generate web applications, and it is recognized due to its eloquent and sophisticated syntax. Laravel also provides several web development tools, especially for large and modern web applications, because it remains accessible through improved versions. Its popularity is increasing day by day, and it is becoming the first choice of developers due to the continuous growth. Additionally, the developers use it in the streamlined development process.
In this detailed and simplified guide, you will be able to install the Laravel framework on Ubuntu 20.04 server or 20.04 LTS operating system.
This article provides an easy guide on how to install Laravel PHP Framework with Nginx on Ubuntu 20.04. The tutorial highlights the steps to install PHP and the other required modules such as Composer, MySQL, Nginx, and other configurations for a Laravel project on the Ubuntu 20.04 LTS operating system.
The Debian Package (dpkg) is a Linux management low-level tool as compared to APT. It is used to perform different operations such as installing, updating or removing the .deb packages. The .deb is an extension for the Linux Debian software packages and their derivatives. The Debian Packages Management consists of several libraries and executable files related to a particular suite of programs. It has 51,000 packages with access to multiple online repositories. Most software packages are free to install, but you can also install paid software from the repository.
If you’re working on Linux distributions like Ubuntu, then you must deal with the .deb packages. The dpkg tool helps monitor the Debian command queries, install and remove software packages, and the dependencies associated with these packages.
You can execute the dpkg using the command-line parameters with a single action or option. But there is also another well-known front-end interface for the Debian packages named Aptitude. Users can also perform actions and monitor the .deb packages using the Aptitude tool.
Just like Microsoft Office, LibreOffice is an office productivity tool introduced in September 2010. It comes with 115 different languages for the ease of users, and its many features make it flexible and portable.
LibreOffice is an open-source suite consisting of several applications with several features like word documentation, spreadsheets, graphical editing, database management, etc. Not only this, it is compatible and supports file formats of other popular office productivity suites such as Microsoft Office and Google Workplace, etc.
It is a portable tool and can be run on different platforms such as Linux, Microsoft Windows, macOS. The difference between Microsoft Office and LibreOffice is that LibreOffice is an open-source community version, whereas Microsoft Office gets charged to purchase a license for commercial products.
In Linux and Unix-like systems, we are always amazed to see several ways for a single operation. Whether to install something or to perform through the command-line, you will get multiple utilities and commands.
Even if you want to move, copy or rename a directory, it is quite handy to perform these functions with commands; you don’t need to install any specific tool.
In Linux distributions, everything is in the form of directories. So, it is good to keep all of them in a structured way. Sometimes, we need to create temporary folders to save data and later on, to keep them permanently, we have to rename those directories.
There are no traditional commands to rename a folder/directory; it can be done using several ways. We will discuss in this guide how to change the directory name using the “mv” command and “rename” command. It might shock you that this operation can be performed using the “mv” command. The “mv” command is not only used to move one directory to another; it is a multi-purpose command which helps to rename a directory as well.
Today we are looking at how to install Handbrake 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.
TeamViewer is a powerful remote desktop and file sharing application that works with most operating systems and mobile devices. In order to commercialize the use of TeamViewer, you have to purchase a license. You can use it free for personal use only.
An RPM package of Teamviewer is built by the official team is available for installation on Fedora systems. You can download the package from its official website.
This tutorial described how to install TeamViewer on the Fedora Linux system.
Setting up a Linux distribution from scratch is not an easy thing. When I am a newbie to Linux I Installed Linux Mint on my laptop and spent weeks setting up all my development tools, packages, and customized my desktops.
After few weeks my OS crashed and I was not able to recover from it because I haven’t got any backup. At this point, I searched for good backup solutions in Linux and found many programs that do similar work. One such program is Timeshift.
Web seeds are links to same file from another source which can be added to a torrent download session to improve its download speed. Examples of torrent programs who can add web seeds including KTorrent and qBitTorrent but not Transmission. This tutorial explains through an example how we can add several web seeds to a running torrent download using the program KTorrent.
The GNU Bash is primarily aprogram that interprets commands entered by the user at the prompt.
When using CentOS, systemadministration or applications development tasksareperformed using either thecommand-line interface (CLI), such asthe Bash shell, or with the help of a GUI, such as GNOME, KDE, and so on. In this section, we will learn how to enter commands in the Bash shell at the Linux console.
Accurate date and time is essential in Linux systems because some services such as job scheduler (cron jobs) and scripts rely on the accurate time to provide expected output. The network time protocol commonly known as NTP is used to maintain the accurate time in Linux systems. NTP is an internet protocol which plays a vital role in synchronizing the date and time in Linux systems from the available online NTP servers.
Most of the old Linux systems have been using ntpd daemon to synchronize the date and time but in some modern operating systems, it is deprecated. For the implementation of ntpd in modern OSes we have chrony. In this article we will learn how to install and use chrony on Linux system to synchronize date and time.
As the name suggests, minikube is a single node Kubernetes (k8s) cluster. Anyone who is new to the Kubernetes and wants to learn and try deploying application on it, then minikube is the solution. Minikube provides a command line interface to manage Kubernetes (k8s) cluster and its component.
In this article we will cover the installation of Minikube on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS / 21.04.
Most people should be able to install FreeDOS 1.3 RC4 very easily using the installer. The FreeDOS installer asks a few questions, then takes care of the rest—including making space for FreeDOS and making the system bootable.
Projects running different actions in function of sun exposure usually need acquiring information on the light level as a trigger to execute specified tasks. Photoresistors with Raspberry PI Pico can provide light info by acquiring analog levels from its input pins
In this tutorial, I’m going to show you how to use a photoresistor with Raspberry Pi Pico. If you have instead a Foundation computer board, you can also use my tutorial to use Photoresistors with Raspberry PI computer board.
Toy Story 2, the film where Jessie joins the adventures of Woody, Buzz Lightyeart and the rest of the toys, has an impressive story that few know. When the movie had been in production for over ten months and was almost ready, a simple Linux / Unix command to delete a file erased the entire tape without having a backup. It almost ended in catastrophe!
The story happened in 1998 when someone in the pixar studios en Richmond, executed by distraction the option “remove” on your computer and in just a few seconds almost completely lost all files from Toy Story 2, including the work of the entire production staff.
Rsync stands for “Remote Sync.” It is a synchronization method for directories and files that works both locally and remotely. This tool employs the “delta algorithm” that reduces the amount of copied data by only transferring the modified part of the files or directories. In this post, we will go through the basics of using this tool to sync a directory.
For Linux based system, rsync is a file synchronization tool. This tool is based on the “delta algorithm” that makes the remotes file syncing faster. It deploys this algorithm by transmitting only the differences or modifications in the files across the network. For syncing files, rsync does not require the set of files that exist at one of the link ends. Therefore, it is considered a lightweight program. After the complete transfer of initial files, it only syncs the changed file bits. It also provides support for offsite backups in which it syncs data to a remote system present outside of the firewall. Many Linux users also utilize rsync for mirroring websites.
Rsync or remote synchronization is a Linux and Unix-based utility that syncs files and directories efficiently between two devices or hosts. In this synchronization process, one is the local host or the source from which we will sync the files, and the other is the remote host, where all the synchronization will occur.
rsync is a command-line tool used for the synchronization of directories and files between two systems. It supports syncing files, directories, devices, file and directory owners, groups, and permissions. The remote-update protocol that transfers the change between directories or file content distinguishes rsync from other file synchronization commands in Linux.
I recently needed to utilize rsync to copy and update the new files that did not already exist at the destination system or directory. Are you also willing to use rsync for only updating and transferring new files? Then follow the rest of the article to learn how to do it.
Every processor in the machine needs an amount of data capacity to run and store loaded applications. All the PCs are designed to have primary and secondary memories from where programs can run, and information is being stored while executing. You need to think about storage seriously if you belong to IT or working as a computer scientist. In that case, bundles of software packages are required to work on.
There could be many issues related to storage capacity in Linux systems to run applications; you need adequate RAM; otherwise, the application will crash.
The Swap in the Linux system helps when RAM is about to exhaust. While working with multiple applications, if RAM fills up and there is no space to function, the system starts utilizing the secondary storage where Swap is located.
Privacy is an essential part of someone’s life, whether social media or the workplace. It helps protect the personal and professional data that we don’t want to share with everybody. Sometimes, people work on sensitive data that couldn’t be shared inside or outside the firm.
Similarly, when multiple users are connected with the system, they may need some private access to the specific resources. If we talk about files or folders/directories permission, it means you allow them to read, write, or modify the files or directories. It is essential to revert the ownership of files/folders from the users who are not part of your current account but can own them.
It is assumed as challenging for a Linux user to access permission to a file or folder because they are a bit aware of it. Setting the permission to the specific folder is quite simple and can be done via command-line or GUI (we will later discuss how we can do it).
Copying the file or folder means creating a new file having duplicate content as in the existing file. Sometimes, we need to copy the files or folders rather than having a backup program. The files can be copied with the same name, or you can change the name as well.
Copying a file, folder, or directory is a simple and basic task in the Linux operating system. Rename, delete or copy commands are used as daily purpose operations while working with the command-line interface.
Although there are multiple commands to copying the files, the “cp” and “rsync” command are widely used simplest approaches.
Adding and removing the users are the most basic functions when getting started with the centOS 8. We may need to have many users and allow them sudo permissions. And sometimes, due to security purposes, you want to remove them from the host. The account with the sudo privileges can run the system as an administrator that a normal user cannot. These privileges allow the user to act as a root user through which the user can perform all the administrative tasks or commands.
It is not compulsory to assign the root password to every user. If you assign them sudo permissions, they will have access to perform all the operations without knowing the root password.
Unmounting a file/folder means it is inaccessible for the device to read and make any modification. To access the particular unmounted folder or drive, we need to mount it first. Mounted drives mean it is in the active state, and data is accessible for the system. Multiple types of disks can be mounted, such as USB, flash memory disk, external hard drives, etc. When a disk or drive is unmounted, it prevents the data from the device.
In the Linux system, there are several mounted and unmounted devices. The mount command helps to mount while the umount command unmount the storage drives or filesystem.
VirtualBox is a well-known open-source hypervisor used for installing and using multiple guest operating systems simultaneously on an operating system or host.
While working in a VirtualBox and its virtual machines, if you find the display is very slow and you want to improve it or in other words, if we use true technical terms, we need to increase the video memory, then this is exactly the right place to get the answer.
To increase the virtual machine’s video memory, all you need to do is change a little setting in the Virtual Machine settings in VirtualBox and increase the video memory as per your requirements.
The system or server administrator often needs to keep a terminal session alive for maintaining a process or application running. However, when we close the SSH connection or do not send any information to the server, the terminal session will close. To prevent the server to auto-close the terminal session, we can perform some configuration.
Steam editor, shortened as sed, is a command used to find and replace any text in a file using various techniques and syntaxes. In this post, we will grasp the concepts of sed and learn how you can replace a variable or its value in a file using sed.
The symbolic link, also known as symlink or soft link, is the file type that can hold the location of a file or directory in any Linux file system. You have created a couple of Symbolic links in your Linux filesystem, and sometimes there comes a need to list all the symbolic links. This post provides you with a step-by-step guide on how to list all symlinks in a Linux filesystem or a specific Linux directory.
From a couple of ways to list all the symbolic links in a Linux directory, we will follow the reliable and best way using the find command.
Symlink, also known as a symbolic link in Linux, creates a link to a file or a directory for easier access. To put it in another way, symlinks are links that points to another file or folder in your system, quite similar to the shortcuts in Windows. Some users refer to symlinks as soft-links. Before moving forward, let’s elaborate soft-links and hard-links.
Hard-links: Hard-links are the links that mirror or copy the original file. Hard-links have the same inode numbers.
Soft-links: Soft-links are simple links that points to the original file. You can access the original file through soft links. Soft-links can point to a file or folder in any partition and have different inode numbers.
Learning about creating symlink in Linux is a great way to improve your grip on the Linux terminal. So, let’s learn the steps involved in making the soft-links in Linux.
Every device comes up with the “Recovery Mode” feature which has the capability to perform different operations. These operations include cleaning the junk data, update installation, data restoration, back up or device reset.
Similarly, in Linux distributions, we also have the accessibility of the “Recovery Mode” feature. It allows the user to reboot the system and get it with a new setup.
We may need “recovery mode” at any time in the system. There could be many possibilities, i.e when the system slows down, it fails to start up for any reason, or if you find any glitches, then it means your system needs to recover. You can also recover broken files and test if the memory is working correctly or not.
In many situations, we need to disable some unnecessary services in Ubuntu to keep the system well maintained. Disabling redundant services helps to improve the system’s efficacy as some of these services use the processor and a portion of the memory in the background. Services can be disabled temporarily or permanently, but it depends upon your need.
Before we discuss how we can disable services in Ubuntu, let’s understand the initialization system of Ubuntu. There are two different initialization systems Ubuntu uses. The first one is the “upstart” and the second is “systemd”.
The “upstart” is now deprecated and was last used in Ubuntu 15.04. The init system of current Ubuntu and many other distributions is “systemd”. Both systems have their own methods to enable and disable services. Since the latest distributions have been widely adopted, we will use “systemd” method to disable a service.
On the internet, a user is recognized by a distinctive identity called IP address. This 32-bit address is dynamically assigned by Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP). Addresses allocated by DHCP can be changed upon rebooting your system, whereas static IP address does not change.
So why do people use static IP address? Static IP address is crucial if you run the server on your device to share files and other services. You can pay your internet service provider (ISP) to get a static IP address, or you can tweak and make your dynamic IP address into static in your system as well.
Though both IP configurations have their own purposes and are not perfect, static IPs are easy to hack and will cost you. Whereas dynamic IPs are not suitable for hosting services, they can cause connection interruptions and less accurate geo-location.
It is very important for you to know the type of your IP address for a number of reasons. There are many methods to check the type of your allocated IP address. This write-up is going to mention some of the approaches to learn about the type of IP address your system has. So, let’s begin.
It's nearly time for another truly wild adventure as Double Fine has confirmed an August 25 launch for Psychonauts 2.
This was announced during the Xbox E3 showcase, since Double Fine are now part of Xbox Game Studios. The good news, is that Linux support is still confirmed and they mentioned this multiple times with no indication of any delays.
"Razputin “Raz” Aquato, trained acrobat and powerful young psychic, has realized his lifelong dream of joining the international psychic espionage organization known as the Psychonauts! But these psychic super spies are in trouble. Their leader hasn't been the same since he was rescued from a kidnapping, and what's worse, there's a mole hiding in headquarters."
After a successful crowdfunding campaign in 2018, Starmancer from Ominux Games and publisher Chucklefish has now been confirmed to be available in Early Access on August 5.
In Starmancer players build their own space station, taking on the role of the station A.I. tasked with sustaining human life, regrowing bodies for the thousands of minds trapped in your memory banks and defending the station at any cost. Starmancer offers gameplay with consequences, a living sandbox environment, crafting, and managing the daily lives of colonists. Create a fully functional space station that supports a utopian society where everyone is well fed, happy, and safe under the watchful eye of a benevolent A.I.
Book of Travels might end up being one of the most innovative online RPGs to come along in some time, and we'll be able to see what it's all about on August 9.
"Join Book of Travels and become part of a unique social roleplaying experience that doesn’t hold your hand. Inspired by genre classics, this is a serene adventure that sets you adrift in a fairytale world... it’s also an invitation to roleplay without the restraints of linear missions and plotlines. Feel at liberty to travel the free wilds and vivid cities of the Braided Shore peninsula. Wander deep into the layers of this hand-drawn world, stumble upon its hidden places or unravel one of its many mysteries. There is no overarching goal and no real beginning or end, but for mortal characters the stakes can be high."
They call it a TMORPG "tiny multiplayer online role-playing game", as you will be able to come across other players but in very small numbers per game. You also can't chat normally, as you need to learn the special symbol language used.
[...]
Everything we've seen still clearly has Linux there so we're good to go for it on August 9 for Early Access.
After quite a success with the first episode being free, along with a very successful Kickstarter campaign, the second episode of Scarlet Hollow is now available. You can still play the first episode free but the main thing now being available at a cost in Early Access includes the second episode, along with more episodes coming up to a total of seven.
Even if you're not usually into adventures styled like a visual novel, Scarlet Hollow is easily worth going through, especially with it being designed by award winning graphic novelist Abby Howard.
Still due to release sometime next year for Linux and Windows (with Switch announced now too), Kitsune Tails is a platformer styled after beloved classics steeped in Japanese mythology and diverse relationships. It looks seriously cute too.
Now the New Frontier Pass expansions and free upgrades are done, it's not entirely clear if another pass will come along or if that's finally it but they say it offers the "complete Civilization VI experience", even though they sort-of teased more was coming by mentioning the last free update was the "final free update of the season". They key wording there being season. Otherwise, why wouldn't they just say it was the final and leave it as that?
It was only a few days ago we mentioned that Death Trash, which looks simply incredible will be getting a demo for the Steam Next Fest soon but we now also know it will enter Early Access on August 5.
With a fleshy gruesome post-apocalyptic world, Death Trash is six years in the making! While still unfinished, the developer believe the foundation is solid enough now to get it properly out in the world with gameplay that "feels satisfying and is complex enough, a good amount of content, a solid framework and tools, many design problems figured out, platform features implemented, and a plan where we want to go with the game".
Starting with the KDE Frameworks 5.84 release, KXMLGUI based applications will feature expandable tooltips per default.
The matching merge request by Felix Ernst got merged today after 3 months ;=)
What are expandable tooltips at all?
Good question ;=)
In short: for stuff like menu & toolbar actions, it provides an easy way to access the “What’s This?” help.
Unlike before, where you need to manually trigger that via the “Shift-F1” shortcut and click around to try out which GUI elements provide at all this additional help, you will now first get a small tooltip with the normal tooltip content (if any) and a hint that with “Shift” you are able to get more help displayed.
A year ago I’d just finished my History degree and I had no idea how to code. This year, I’m taking part in Google Summer of Code! I’m super happy to get the chance to learn more about how KDE software works, and to finally contribute to a project I’ve been using for years.
Over the summer, I’ll be working with KDE developers to create productivity-focused components for Plasma Mobile that work with Akonadi, KDE’s personal information management framework. Akonadi is a super useful piece of kit: it allows developers to tap into a user’s synchronised e-mails, contacts, calendars, providing a seamless experience in productivity tools. I’ll be working on this project with my mentor Carl Schwan, who also helped me during my time doing Season of KDE, and Devin Lin.
Of course, under the hood, a lot is different. We built a brand new message-passing kernel, new connectivity stacks, component model, file-systems, you name it. And yes, there are a few security things I'm excited about.
Its interesting to watch Youtube reviews for openSUSE Leap 15.3. One of the main critics is that it doesn’t offer the latest KDE and GNOME desktop versions. “The software is quite old.” Yes, that is not very interesting for a reviewer. Because as a reviewer, you like to point out what is new. And what is exiting. And the goal of openSUSE Leap 15.3 is to not be exciting. The goal is to be stable.
openSUSE Leap and SUSE Linux Enterprise have moved closer together over the last few years. I remember all the effort that has been put into making sure that the codebase for the base packages of openSUSE Leap and SUSE Linux Enterprise were similar. In may 2015 (yes, that is a while ago) Richard Brown announced that the latest SUSE Enterprise Sources where now available in the Open Build Service and he presented the vision for a new stable release version, which would be named openSUSE Leap. But after that, there was still a lot of work. It took a couple of releases (42.1, 42.2, 42.3 and then 15) before the base packages of Leap and SLE were completely aligned. From openSUSE Leap 15 and onwards, SUSE officially supported organizations who wanted to migrate from Leap 15 to SLE 15. And this new release takes that integration even further. From openSUSE Leap 15.3 and onwards, the binary packages of the base of Leap 15.3 and SLE 15 Service Pack 3 will be identical. The packages on top of that base will be ‘community backports’. And these packages will work on both Leap 15.3 and on SLE 15 Service Pack 3.
So you will get a rock solid distribution, because it needs to be enterprise grade. Enterprises don’t have the time, nor the willingness to mess with software. They want to get work done. The software should just work. And that is exactly what you should expect from openSUSE Leap 15.3. This might be a bit boring for a reviewer or for a Linux enthusiast. Because a typical Linux enthusiast wants to try out the latest and greatest software. They want to play around with the new KDE Plasma 5.22 (released on the 8th June 2021). Or they want to play with the new GNOME 40 desktop (released on the 24th March 2021). They can, if they install the latest openSUSE Tumbleweed.
My first experience with IRC was in 1999. I was in middle school, and a friend of mine ordered a Slackware CD from Walnut Creek CDROM. This was Slackware 3.4, and contained the GNOME 1.x desktop environment on the disc, which came with the BitchX IRC client.
At first, I didn’t really know what BitchX was, I just thought it was a cool program that displayed random ascii art, and then tried to connect to various servers. After a while, I found out that an IRC client allowed you to connect to an IRC network, and get help with Slackware.
At that time, freenode didn’t exist. The Slackware IRC channel was on DALnet, and I started using DALnet to learn more about Slackware. Like most IRC newbies, it didn’t go so well: I got banned from #slackware in like 5 minutes or something. I pleaded for forgiveness, in the way redolent of a middle schooler. And eventually, I got unbanned and stuck around for a while. That was my first experience with IRC.
[...]
For a few years, all was well, until the end of July 2002, when DALnet started being the target of Distributed Denial of Service attacks. We would of course, later find out that these attacks were at the request of Jason Michael Downey (Nessun), who had just launched a competing IRC network called Rizon.
[...]
In early 2006, lilo launched his Spinhome project. Spinhome was a fundraising effort so that lilo could get a mobile home to replace the double-wide trailer he had been living in. Some people saw him trying to fundraise while being the owner of freenode as a conflict of interest, which lead to a falling out with a lot of staffers, projects, etc. OFTC went from being a small network to a much larger network during this time.
One side effect of this was that the atheme project got spun out into its own organization: atheme.org, which continues to exist in some form to this day.
The atheme.org project was founded on the concept of promoting digital autonomy, which is basically the network equivalent of software freedom, and has advocated in various ways to preserve IRC in the context of digital autonomy for years. In retrospect, some of the ways we advocated for digital autonomy were somewhat obnoxious, but as they say, hindsight is always 20/20.
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Self-hosting is really what makes IRC great: you can run your own server for your community and not be beholden to anyone else. As far as IRC goes, that’s the future I feel motivated to build.
This concludes my coverage of the freenode meltdown. I hope people enjoyed it and also understand why freenode was important to me: without lilo‘s decision to take a chance on a dumbfuck kid like myself, I wouldn’t have ever really gotten as deeply involved in FOSS as I have, so to see what has happened has left me heartbroken.
RPMs are the smallest building blocks of the Fedora Linux system. This session will walk through the basics of building an RPM from source code. You will learn how to set up your Fedora system to build RPMs, how to write a spec file that adheres to the Fedora Packaging Guidelines, and how to use it to generate RPMs for distribution. The session will also provide a brief overview of the complete Fedora packaging pipeline.
While no prior knowledge of building RPMs or building software from its source code is required, some software development experience will be useful. The hope is to help users learn the skills required to build and maintain RPM packages, and to encourage them to contribute to Fedora by joining the package collection maintainers.
Ellen Ullman wrote this in 1998, but it applies just as much today to the way we build modern applications; that is, over time, with short-term plans, on top of legacy software. In this article, I will introduce a few patterns and tools that I believe work well for thoughtfully modernizing legacy applications and building modern event-driven systems.
Note: Consider joining me for my session at Red Hat Summit 2021 on June 16, or at the Event-driven architecture virtual event on June 22. I will present about tools and patterns for application modernization at both sessions, and you will be able to ask me questions live.
The microservice architectural style structures an application as a collection of services. These services are often large, monolithic applications that are broken into smaller services.
In Red Hat OpenShift, a build is the process of transforming source code and binaries into a container image that can run securely on a container platform. In this article, we'll introduce Project Shipwright, a framework for building container images on Kubernetes, and explore the future of builds in Red Hat OpenShift.
A career in software engineering or IT can sometimes feel like high-stakes gambling. New technologies and languages are always emerging and evolving, and new opportunities often involve taking risks and choosing between startups that could experience tremendous success – or flame out within months.
The COVID-19 pandemic has only made things more treacherous. While many use moments of crisis to consider major life and career changes, a recent article from Harvard Business Review points out that in reality, “threatening situations prompt us to behave more conservatively,” leading to potentially stalled careers.
The pandemic has had an even more acute effect on women in the workplace. According to a poll from CNBC and Survey Monkey, 22 percent of women have experienced a career setback within the past 12 months.
These days, change is not novel. It is something that IT leaders have learned to embrace, accept, and even welcome, which has become particularly important over the past 14 months. We have had to be nimble and flexible in nearly every facet of our job and change management is no exception.
Leading change management requires a solid foundation before moving forward with a strategy and these most recent challenges have accentuated the need for leaders to focus on being more intentional. This means being flexible with respect to employee schedules, understanding of the challenges they may have had working remotely or in their personal lives, and being deliberate about reaching out to them to make sure they’re happy, comfortable, and adjusting well to the different dynamics that the pandemic has introduced.
Beyond the emotional well-being of employees, IT leaders need to ensure that employees have the tools necessary to be successful. Are they happy with the equipment they received at the start of the pandemic to facilitate remote work? Do they need anything else? Are they satisfied with the technical support that is available?
Most systems-on-module come with a processor, memory, storage, and maybe a PMIC and some extra chips such as an Ethernet PHY. Some add wireless connectivity with a WiFi & Bluetooth module, but TT Electronics S-2Connect Creo SoM is more unusual as a Linux-powered SO-DIMM module with built-in Cat M1 & NB-IoT cellular connectivity, as well as GPS.
This is implemented through Quectel BG95-M3 multi-mode LPWA module and an eSIM and a micro SIM socket in combination with an NXP i.MX 6UL processor Cortex-A7 processor along with 256MB RAM and a 4GB eMMC flash.
DAB Embedded HaneSOM is a tiny (4 cm2) system-on-module based on Microchip SAMA5D2 Arm Cortex-A5 processor running Linux, which could make it the world’s smallest Linux module.
The small size is made possible by the use of a SAMA5D2 system-in-package that also integrates 128MB DDR2, and the only two other chips on the modules are a 4MB flash (GD25Q32) and the PMIC (MIC2800).
Google has a firm grip on the desktop. Their products and services are ubiquitous. Don’t get us wrong, we’re long-standing admirers of many of Google’s products and services. They are often high quality, easy to use, and ‘free’, but there can be downsides of over-reliance on a specific company. For example, there are concerns about their privacy policies, business practices, and an almost insatiable desire to control all of our data, all of the time.
What if you are looking to move away from Google and embark on a new world of online freedom, where you are not constantly tracked, monetised and attached to Google’s ecosystem.
In this series, we explore how you can migrate from Google without missing out on anything. We’ll recommend open source solutions.
Modern developers are highly technical, opinionated, passionate, community-focused, driven, polyglot, and most importantly, empowered decision-makers. Today, developers have a say in the products being built and the tools and technologies used to build them. Most importantly, time is precious, and developers and project managers can always benefit from great efficiency. To attain great efficiency, though, you must understand the software lifecycle, and how it can be organized and manipulated.
The industry is still working on perfecting how a developer's time is spent. We can divide a developer's major tasks into two different "loops"...
The JDBC project is proud to announce the latest version 42.2.21.
This post describes two similar solutions to the Quiz #2, using the data files found there. The two solutions described here rely on split-on-values. The first solution is the one that came naturally to me, and is by far the most general and extensible, but the second one is shorter, and doesn't require external script files.
The Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) seems to be an e-mail standard for transmitting and directing messages among email systems. The smtplib package in Python creates an SMTP customer conference entity that could be cast off to direct an email to any computer on the Internet that has an SMTP or ESMTP listening service.
In this tutorial, we will let you know about the methods to send emails using SMTP in your system. We have been using the Spyder new version to do our email send implementation via python in Ubuntu 20.04. Login from your Ubuntu 20.04 system to start implementing it.
In computing, string combining is an overall common process. Concatenating strings in Python may be expressed in a variety of ways. This tutorial will look at various methods for concatenating strings inside a Python application. To concatenate strings with a delimiter, we may use the join() method. It is beneficial to have a character sequence, such as a list or perhaps a tuple of characters. Then, use the join() method with an empty string whenever you don’t want a delimiter. Use these methods according to your needs. Whenever concatenation requires any formatting, just use format() as well as f-string functions. It’s worth noting that f-string only works with Python 3.6 and higher. Let’s have a look at each one of them.
Socket programming is a method of allowing two nodes within a network to interact with one another. One socket (node) reads on a certain port upon an IP address. Whereas, the former one connects with it. The client connects towards a server and the server creates the auditor socket. These are the true foundations of online surfing.
To put it simply, there is indeed a server as well as a client. Integrating the socket package and creating a basic socket are the first steps in socket programming. At the time of implementing this article, we have been using Ubuntu 20.04 Linux system. Here are some examples of Python Socket Programming.
In Data Visualization, we use graphs and charts to represent data. The visual form of data makes it easy for data scientists and everybody to analyze data and draw the results.
The histogram is one of the elegant ways to represent distributed continuous or discrete data. And in this Python tutorial, we will see how we can analyze data in Python using Histogram.
So, let’s get started!
I would dearly love to say that I am a friend of Peter Tatchell, but I can’t really claim to be more than an acquaintance and perhaps ally. We have shared a platform several times, always say hi to each other at demos and events where we see each other, but have never really had a personal conversation. Peter always appears to me somewhat withdrawn; a mutual friend described him to me as aloof. I think he is shy, which seems a strange thing to say about someone whose life has been, as the new Netflix documentary Hating Peter Tatchell makes plain, a series of spectacular and often individual performance protest events.
An ally of JK Rowling who lost her job after tweeting that “male people are not women” has won a landmark employment case.
Group of Seven (G-7) leaders on Sunday announced their commitments to cutting forced labor practices out of global supply chains in a shot at China, as well as efforts to stop ransomware attacks and root out corruption.
The three priorities will be outlined in a joint communique, to be released at the conclusion of the summit in the United Kingdom and signed by the heads of state of the U.S., the U.K., Canada, Italy, France, Japan and Germany.
The United States and Russia sparred Sunday about responsibility for debilitating cyberattacks as U.S. President Joe Biden and Russian President Vladimir Putin prepared for their summit in Geneva on Wednesday.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken told ABC’s “This Week” show, “No responsible country should be in the business of harboring in any way criminal organizations engaged in cyberattacks, including ransomware.”
Volkswagen Group of America said on Friday an unauthorized third party obtained limited personal information about customers and interested buyers from a vendor that its Audi Volkswagen brands and some U.S. and Canadian dealers used for digital sales and marketing.
Police have been using or trialling at least three tools to search social media activity during investigations, but won't say what ones.
They say the tools are used to scan publicly accessible - or open source - internet pages.
Some tools are controversial overseas, for instance, one being used to track Black Lives Matter protesters or monitor electronic chatter.
In an OIA response, police said they had used three social media search tools since 2018, including on cyber crime and the mosque terror attacks investigation, and to feed into the Royal Commission of Inquiry into the attacks.
The first part of our assessment of Washington’s 20 years of continuous war in the Middle East focused on its military and political costs. This part will discuss the economic consequences of this misadventure. Imperial overstretch, as historian Paul Kennedy points out, is not only a result of a mismatch between military goals and military resources but of the increasing inability of the economy to generate the resources to support a political and military strategy that might have seemed manageable when it began.
According to him, other people at the table tried to calm the situation down. But others did the opposite … Among them, a “veiled woman” who did not hesitate to call one of the restaurant owner’s two daughters, aged 24 and 31, a “whore”. The latter was “groped” by the “veiled woman”, as she told actu.fr. She filed a complaint against X for insult, intentional violence and cyber-harassment. The group then left without paying and before the police arrived. “They told us they would come back and burn everything down. “
The eastern region of the Democratic Republic of Congo has long been a cradle of rebel activity, often the spill-over of conflict in neighbouring Rwanda, Burundi and Uganda.
Among the most notorious groups now operating there is Uganda's Allied Democratic Forces (ADF).
The Islamist militant outfit was formed in the 1990s and primarily concerned itself with domestic grievances within Uganda.
But after re-emerging in DR Congo, its activity has taken on a more global jihadist dimension, with attacks increasingly being claimed in the name of the Islamic State (IS) group.
Note: The following text is based on a speech delivered at a rally Thursday night, June 10, in New York City in support of Julian Assange, currently imprisoned at Belmarsh Prison in the United Kingdom under threat of possible extradition to the United States. John and Gabriel Shipton, Julian’s father and brother, also spoke at the event, which was held at The People’s Forum.
This week, ProPublica published a treasure trove of information on the financial lives of some of our wealthiest citizens. The info confirmed what many tax experts already know: There is one tax system for the rich and another for everyone else. By using perfectly legal and straightforward strategies like holding assets, borrowing money and passing the assets to family members at their death, wealthy people can essentially choose whether and how much income tax they want to pay
Anti-poverty groups, climate campaigners, and public health experts reacted with outrage and howls of disappointment Sunday after the G7 leaders who spent the weekend at a summit in Cornwall, England issued a final communique that critics said represents an extreme abdication of responsibility in the face of the world's most pressing and intertwined crises—savage economic inequality, a rapidly-heating planet, and the deadly Covid-19 pandemic.
"The G7 is not fit for purpose. They have operated without any concern for lives around the world—or even for our own ability to end this pandemic."
It stirs a lot of feelings and memories for me. I’ve devoted myself to climate direct action for over two decades. Half of it, I spent fighting the Keystone XL pipeline. Through my KXL journey, I was arrested sitting-in the White House, recruited tens of thousands to pledge to take action, trained thousands in direct action to disrupt Obama’s approval of the pipeline (hell, I even trained the trainers), supported the environmentalists and landowners that disrupted the construction of the southern leg of the pipeline in Texas (which got built anyway) and generally made elite politicos and Wall Street bankers miserable over it. In 2013, I discovered that TransCanada had compiled a file on me and my friends and traveled to law enforcement along the pipeline route with a PowerPoint telling them that we were terrorists. We also declared victory on KXL more than once.
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In 1973 the Black legal scholar Derrick Bell published a thousand-page book called “Race, Racism and American Law.” It was a study of how the law failed to address racism, not just regarding Blacks, but Asians and other immigrants. Bell proposed innovative teaching techniques to challenge the convention that the law was in any way colorblind. The book wasn’t heavily reviewed. One reviewer in a scholarly journal even asked: “how much in demand (or how valuable) is a course dealing solely with racism, especially in the seeming ebb tide of student activism?"
New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez gave voice Sunday to the growing frustration among progressives due to Democratic Senators who have become the clear obstructionists in enacting the bold agenda they promised U.S. voters in last year's election.
Following a morning appearance on CNN's "State of the Union," Ocasio-Cortez said Democrats "have an obligation to do the most we can for working people, civil right, and the planet with the power people have entrusted us, and stressed during her television appearance that her side of the aisle should bend no further to the demands of a minority Republican Party that has a demonstrated history of acting in bad faith while making clear that defeating progress on key issues like infrastructure, healthcare, climate action, and pro-democracy reforms is its top priority.
Only in Hong Kong have museums been allowed that truly challenge the party line. But on June 2nd officials there closed a tiny museum dedicated to the crushing of the Tiananmen Square protests on June 4th 1989. They cited a licensing problem. However, the move coincided with a ban on an annual vigil commemorating the bloodshed. In this case the pandemic was given as the reason, but many activists fear the massacre is becoming taboo in Hong Kong, just as it is on the mainland. The party’s all-round leadership of museums may be spreading into new territory. ââÂ
The new SAA president, Deborah Nichols, subsequently contacted me to let me know that the video of our live talk would not be posted by the SAA for others to view, due to reports of hurt feelings. (We had previously relied on the SAA’s emailed assurance to presenters that “sessions will be available for viewing on demand within 24–36 hours after their original broadcast, until July 17, 2021.”) Furthermore, we learned, the SAA would not even provide us with the video. (And so we re-recorded the talk, which you can find here.) Another SAA statement was then put out to inform readers that “the SAA board finds the presentation does not align with SAA’s values,” and mentioned that “the board categorically rejects the Weiss-Springer position.”
However, SAA board members did not specify what, exactly, they were “rejecting.” Our talk aligned with important elements of the SAA’s mission statement (“promoting research, stewardship of archaeological resources, public and professional education, and the dissemination of knowledge”); and with the SAA’s education outreach guidelines, which indicate that “since many past cultures left no written records, they can only be studied by examining the physical evidence that they left behind.” Without saying so explicitly, the SAA now seems to have taken the position that past cultures should be presumptively understood through orally transmitted creation myths interpreted in a literal sense.
Ms. Mello pointed out that today, the muzzling of the press has taken on a different hue. She called it “censorship by noise and defamation”. It is a trait that has been normalised in India. She said: “Censorship, in this new world, doesn’t require the suppression of information. On the one hand, populist leaders flood social media, messaging apps, and the internet in general with the version of facts they want to prevail – so that it drowns out investigations and negative news. It’s the so-called censorship by noise. Then, for that manipulation of public opinion to succeed, these digital populist leaders need to delegitimise professional journalism.”
The act of delegitimising professional journalism undermines news media’s status as the fourth estate and denies it the crucial watchdog role. This blatant institutional capture not only ruptures our democratic fabric but also irreparably damages it.
Gag orders that the U.S. Justice Department imposed on lawyers representing two prominent news outlets fighting subpoena requests have raised concerns about First Amendment protections.
The broadcaster CNN reported this week that its top lawyer was subjected to a gag order in 2020, when the Justice Department under then-Attorney General William Barr sought the email records of a national security correspondent.
Under it, their lawyer said he was prevented from knowing what the investigation was about, what reporting it related to, and from speaking with the reporter so the broadcaster could narrow the impact on its coverage.
America’s domestic activists have achieved a great deal. In particular, they have pressured Joe Biden into moving significantly to the left—though, not nearly left enough, given the scale of the challenge—on issues relating to climate and infrastructure. It is perhaps against this backdrop of mounting grassroots pressure that the President told Israel to end its latest effort to, in the words of Israeli commentators, “mow the grass” in occupied Gaza, which along with the increasingly annexed West Bank is Palestinian territory. Whatever the motivation, Israel did, as usual, what its U.S. master instructed.
A daughter of a close associate of Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov who was forcibly removed by police from a shelter for domestic violence victims and rights activists has warned that she could be killed in an "honor killing” if she is returned to her home.
The June 11 warning about Khalima Taramova’s fate came one day after Chechen and Daghestani police raided the apartment in Daghestan, where Taramova fled, and took her away.
The apartment where she was staying was used by domestic violence advocates to protect women fleeing their homes.
Armed with a Chinese press release translated on the fly via Google, federal agents falsely accused an internationally-renown welding technology expert at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville of being a spy and brought him to professional ruin.
Apple has been the subject of multiple antitrust probes alongside other tech giants, including Google. It seems that Japan will be adding its own investigation to the pile in the near future, one that will affect both the iPhone maker and the search giant.
A government panel will apparently launch this month to look into tightening antitrust regulations, according to sources of Nikkei in a report seen by the Mercury News. The panel will apparently discuss the dealings of Apple and Google with Japanese smartphone producers, including whether they handle domestic companies fairly compared to overseas vendors.
The Court of Appeal (inferior jurisdiction) delivered its judgment on May 28 on appeal application 71/2020 LM. The appeal was filed by the German company Leonhard Kurz Stiftung & Co. KG against the decision of the Comptroller of Industrial Property under the Patents and Designs Act, chapter 417 of the Laws of Malta.
The decision of the comptroller had been given on September 24, 2020. The appeal application to the Court of Appeal was filed on October 23, 2020, according to the provisions of article 58 of the Patents and Designs Act.
There are different and specific possibilities of recourse under the Patents and Designs Act, but this case deals specifically about issues related to article 46 of the Patents and Designs Act. On appeal to the Court of Appeal, the applicant unsuccessfully contended that their application to the comptroller according to said article 46 was about the existence of rights and the termination of the same.
[...]
This case centred about language requirements. Indeed, the applicant had filed for a patent with the European Patents Office on December 15, 2014, using the German language.
When the Supreme Court began poking around into the law of patent eligibility just over a decade ago, the invention topics that it considered under the abstract idea exception were limited to types of financial transactions. The invention of Bilski v. Kappos was directed to hedging and that of Alice v. CLS Bank was directed to escrow. While both inventions were ostensibly computer implemented, they involved software being applied to just one rather narrow field of endeavor.
The Court's findings of invalidity in both cases are open to criticism both on procedural and substantive grounds, and these decisions could have been held to the facts of their cases or those of cases similar thereto. But that did not happen. We have seen a continuous expansion of the scope of what is considered to be "abstract" occur in a way that would make 19th-century imperialists jealous.
Since Bilski and Alice, the Federal Circuit has grown the exception to encompass business methods in general, software in general, and more recently mechanical devices and processes involving such devices. Notably, an electric car charger was deemed abstract in ChargePoint v. SemaConnect, as was a garage door opener in Chamberlain Group v. Techtronic Industries. More recently, the controversial decision in American Axle v. Neapco found that a method for tuning driveshaft liners that improved damping capabilities was directed to nothing more than a law of nature and therefore ineligible. American Axle is up for Supreme Court review, but no one expects that the justices will admit that their subject matter eligibility jurisprudence is a Gordian Knot that requires reformulation by way of a sword.
[...] Judge Newman also took a dim view of the majority's consideration of prior art under ۤ 101.
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So, it appears that she is willing to consider some incorporation of ۤ 112 considerations into ۤ 101. This is perhaps in contrast to her colleague, Judge Moore, who coined the term "enablement on steroids" to describe how some panels of the Federal Circuit require that the claims (and not just the specification) enable one to practice the invention.
