I’ve previously written an overview with five reasons to run Linux on Chromebooks, but there are tons of specific examples I could share. One arrived just this morning as one of my former Computer Science teachers reached out, asking if MuseScore could run on a Chromebook.
I had an answer back to her in minutes, along with installation instructions, showing her the versatility of Linux on Chromebooks.
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After about of minute of downloads and installation messages, I had MuseScore on my Chromebook, complete with a Launcher icon.
Of course, installing a Linux app on a Chromebook doesn’t mean it will work 100% of the time or have full functionality.
I was concerned that MuseScore might not play back sounds, so I did a very quick test by composing my own score. And by “composing my own score”, I mean adding three random notes.
Hackaday editors Elliot Williams and Mike Szczys marvel at the dangerous projects on display this week, including glass etching with hydrofluoric acid and pumping 200,000 A into a 5,000 A fuse. A new board that turns the Raspberry Pi into an SDR shows off the power of the secondary memory interface (SMI) present in those Broadcom chips. We also discuss the potential for graphene in hard drives, and finish up with a teardown of a very early electronic metronome.
This phone was beyond strange, but so much fun exploring it. Ubuntu Touch has come quite a ways since I looked at it in 2020.
If all is looking well on Sunday, Linus Torvalds will be releasing Linux 5.13 as stable rather than going with a 5.13-rc8 test release and pushing the final version back by an additional release. In either case, Linux 5.13 is coming out soon and with many new features in tow.
After the merge window ended we published our usual Linux 5.13 feature overview. But for those that don't recall all those changes during the merge window from the end of April to early May, here is a recap of what's in store for this next kernel version with the most prominent changes worth mentioning.
Earlier this month systemd 249-rc1 arrived with a variety of new features and improvements. Now for closing out the month is a second release candidate.
The systemd 249-rc2 release is primarily made up of fixes compared to the prior release candidate. One new feature though to systemd 249-rc2 is the "ConditionOSRelease" directive.
Earlier this month were benchmarks looking at GCC 11 performance with varying optimization levels and features like link-time optimizations. Stemming from reader requests, here are now similar reference benchmarks off LLVM Clang 12.0 on the same system with going from -O0 to -Ofast and toggling -march=native and LTO usage.
On Linux systems, each file is associated with an owner and group owner. When you don’t have the appropriate permission, you won’t be able to access or edit the files or directory. On a Linux system, there is a “change owner” (chown) tool that allows you to change the owner of a file/directory as well as the group owner. Let’s see how you can use the chown command in Linux to better manage your files and folders.
systemd and D-Bus are SELinux-aware applications, with explicit SELinux support built in. Several other services exist on a Linux system that play nicely together with SELinux yet are not SELinux-aware themselves. Many of these services have an affinity with SELinux through their PAM integration.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Htop on AlmaLinux 8. For those of you who didn’t know, Htop is more like a classic top process manager. It displays resource usage measures in color and helps you easily track system performance as an enhanced feature. It has both an additional selection array and a clear picture of the plate, which is the same as the standard main command. It can display detailed information about processor and memory usage, tasks being performed, average load, and uptime. In addition, Htop can also display a list of all operating processes, and can even display it in a tree structure.
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 Htop monitoring tool on an AlmaLinux 8. You can follow the same instructions for Rocky Linux.
Do you have a mobile Ryzen CPU and use Ubuntu? Are you looking to get more CPU performance out of it? Perhaps you want to tweak it to turn down the performance? With the AMD Slimbook Controller, you can! Here’s how to use it on your system.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Signal Messenger on Linux Mint 20. For those of you who didn’t know, Signal Messenger is a popular, multi-platform application used for sending instant messages, making audio and video calls. It is widely used due to the privacy and security features that it provides to the end-user.
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 the step-by-step installation of Signal Messenger on a Linux Mint 20 (Ulyana).
In this video, I am going to show how to install Garuda KDE Dragonized 210621.
FreeRADIUS server is an open-source product and widely used RADIUS server in the world and, in addition to EAP, also supports the RADIUS protocol stands for “Remote Authentication DIAL In User Service”. FreeRADIUS implementation provides users a central authentication system for servers and desktops.
Clients who want to access a network must first log on to the RADIUS server before a connection to the desired network is established. This increases security and makes it easier to manage networks.
This easy to follow step-by-step tutorial explains how to migrate from CentOS 8 to Rocky Linux 8 by using the migrate2rocky script.
Back in December 2020, Red Hat accounted that it will be discontinuing CentOS based on RedHat releases. This was come as quite a shock for the CentOS community. This change resulted in a couple of exciting CentOS forks. The first announced was Rocky Linux.
As you know, CentOS 8 will reach its End-of-Life in December, 2021. If you want to migrate your CentOS 8 server to Rocky Linux 8 which is a 1:1 binary compatible with CentOS and RHEL, then here are the steps to follow.
Ghost is an open source content management system which is suitable for a blog, newsletter or membership website.
It is superfast and SEO optimized. We love it here at Linux Handbook. Our website uses Ghost, of course.
Now, you may opt for a managed Ghost instance from the makers of Ghost itself. It would cost you a lot but you won't have to put effort in deploying Ghost, updating it and maintaining it. And of course, it helps the development of Ghost project.
If you want to avoid spending a lot or take matters in your hand with a 'do it yourself' approach, you may self-host Ghost on your server.
In this tutorial, I'll show you the steps to deploy Ghost with Docker.
Valve announced the latest version of the Steam Play Proton compatibility layer is out now with 6.3-5. Don't know what Steam Play and Proton are? Steam Play is a feature in the Linux Steam client allowing you to run compatibility layers like Proton, which enables you to play games supported on Windows. Be sure to check out our dedicated page for the full run-down. This follows on from the test release that went out earlier in June pulling in many fixes and improvements overall.
Time to grab some really good RPGs here as GOG are giving away the whole Shadowrun Trilogy for 72 hours. Again, this is part of their Summer Sale to try and pull more customers to their DRM-free store.
The modern-retro Atari VCS was announced with much fanfare when it first hit IndieGogo in May 2018. People were very excited to secure a preorder for the first new Atari console since the Atari Jaguar in the 1990s. On its official website, the Atari VCS is championed as "blending the best of consoles and PCs," but in reality the system is nothing more than a watered-down combination of a console and a PC. It sets out to do some interesting things, but it doesn't do anything unique, and it doesn't do anything well. It definitely doesn't justify its price tag.
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The Atari VCS costs too much and does too little for me to recommend it. Its 4K mode is pretty pointless, other than it makes for a nice marketing bullet. The number of built-in games is impressive on paper, but there are too few games you'd actually want to play and too many games that didn't age well at all. PC mode is poorly implemented and doesn't make a lot of sense in practice. It would be better to just install 2600 and MAME games to a PC than to install PC software on a glorified emulation machine.
What more do I need to say? The title says it all. I have personally tested and confirm Mario Golf: Super Rush works with both Yuzu and Ryujinx. Both emulators have been able to achieve 60 FPS on a fairly consistent basis on my end. Check out the footage below:
If you read the news, it’s all about AMD kicking ass left and right. They keep punching Intel on CPUs, they challenge Nvidia on GPUs more daringly than ever, and with (more) open drivers. However, Nvidia is a lot more alive than Intel is, in terms of technology, and in this past week they have demonstrated their commitment to Linux with the newest 470 drivers.
Counter-Strike: Global Offensive popularly known as CS: GO is one of the most popular games of all time. Released in 1999, the game involves two teams where the Terrorist team tries to plant explosives whereas the Counter-Terrorists team tries to prevent it.
Today, I have something new and fresh for you. Back in 2016-2017, I conducted a number of interviews with interesting people in the tech world (Linux and the Internets), shedding light on their endeavors, projects and passions. Then, there's been a quiet period, interviews wise, and now, it is time to do so again. Today's voluntary scapegoat is Nate Graham.
If you're a Linux person, and you happen to be using KDE, then you must have come across Nate, most likely on his personal blog, Pointiest Stick, where he shares big weekly updates on all the good, cool, new, fun, and adventurous stuff going on in the KDE world. I have had brief online encounters with Nate here and there, and I have always liked his cheerful yet punctual approach to software. So I thought, why not interview Nate, and have him share his views, ideas and some of that sweet insider knowledge from behind the Plasma curtain. You should find this article doubly interesting, as I've already had an interview session with KDE's Seb and Bhushan five years back. Perhaps Nate can give us a perspective of what happening in the past few years, and what's coming. Commence to start.
Dear Tumbleweed users and hackers,
During this week, the updates have not caused any stir in the mailing lists, which is usually a good sign. We have released a total of 5 snapshots (0618, 0620, 0621, 0622, and 0623).
Creating an Ansible playbook to automate partition creation and managing storage with Logical Volume Manager (LVM).
At Red Hat (and elsewhere) we use the term Day 2 operations quite a bit, but what does that mean exactly? In this post, we will outline why Day 2 operations are important and explore how products such as Red Hat OpenShift and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) work to optimize your software’s post-installation performance.
The latest EasyOS has a lot of printer drivers, provided by 'gutenprint', 'foomatic-db' and 'brlaser' packages. However, from feedback, it seems that not all Hewlett Packard printers are covered, and users want 'hplip' package.
I have compiled hplip version 3.19.12 in OpenEmbedded. It is not the latest version, but is the version provided in the Dunfell release of OpenEmbedded. I can bump the version if users report a later version of hplip is required to support their printer.
High contrast is baked into GTK. This means most apps on the Librem 5 support high contrast, at least in the GTK menus. With a bit of theming, the phone shell can follow suit and bring high contrast to your pocket.
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Librem 14, Librem Mini, and even the Librem Server can all use gnome-shell themes. You can find lots to test or modify over at gnome-look. At the moment, the Gnome shell is at version 3.8, which is widely supported on updated themes. Once you find a theme, extract it to “~/.themes/”.
In coreboot the open source implementation is the most used one. For instance all Google chromeos platforms use it, so it's well tested. FSP is a propriatary binary provided by Intel that can be split up into 3 components: FSP-T (which is in charge of setting up the early execution environment), FSP-M (which configures the DRAM controller), FSP-S (further silicon init). With the FSP codepath in coreboot you call into FSP-T using the TempRamInit API to set up the early execution environment in which you can execute C code later on. This binary sets up CAR just like coreboot does, but also does some initial hardware initialisation like setting up PCIe memory mapped configuration space. On most platforms coreboot is fully able to do that early hardware init itself, so that extra initialisation in FSP-T is superfluous. After DRAM has been initialised, you want to tear down the CAR environment to start executing code in actual DRAM. Coreboot can do that using open source code. It's typically just a few lines of assembly code to disable the non-eviction mode that CPU is running in. The other option is to call FSP-M with the TempRamExit API. See FSP v2.0 spec for more information on TempRamInit and TempRamExit . Sidenote: running FSP-T TempRamInit does not necessarily mean you need to run TempRamExit, as it is possible to just reuse the simple coreboot code. This is done on some platforms to avoid problems with TempRamExit. It's generally a very bad idea to give up control of setting up the execution environment to external code. The most important technical reason to not do this, is because coreboot needs to be in control of the caching setup. When that is not the case you encounter all kinds of problems because that assumption is really baked in to many parts of the code. Coreboot has different stages: bootblock, romstage, ramstage and those are actually all separate programs that have their well defined execution environment. If a blob or reference code sets up or changes the execution environment, it makes proper integration much harder. Before Intel started integrating FSP into coreboot, AMD had a go at integrating their reference code, called AGESA into coreboot. Even though AGESA was not provided as blob but as open source code, it had very similar integration issues, for exactly this reason: it messed with the execution environment. As a matter of fact, Intel FSP v1.0 messed up the execution environment so badly that it was deemed fatally flawed. Support for FSP v1.0 was subsequently dropped from the coreboot master branch. So for technical reasons you want to avoid using FSP-T inside coreboot at all costs. From a marketting perspective FSP-T is also a disaster. You really cannot call coreboot an open source firmware project if even setting up the execution environment is delegated to a blob.
What if people could get control back and contribute their data to causes and projects they care about? Mozilla Corp. has announced Rally, a privacy-first data sharing platform that puts users in control of their data and empowers them to contribute their browsing data to crowdfund projects for a better Internet and a better society.
Mozilla has teamed up with Princeton University researchers to launch the new Rally research initiative, a crowdsourced scientific effort. Computer scientists, social scientists and other researchers will be able to launch groundbreaking studies about the web and invite users to participate.
Over on the Mozilla blog, the company has announced a new platform, Mozilla Rally, that "puts users in control of their data and empowers them to contribute their browsing data to crowdfund projects for a better Internet and a better society". Rally comes out of work that Mozilla did with Professor Jonathan Mayer's research group at Princeton University.
In May there were 198 alerts generated, resulting in 27 regression bugs being filed on average 4.5 days after the regressing change landed.
Welcome to the May 2021 edition of the performance sheriffing newsletter. Here you’ll find the usual summary of our sheriffing efficiency metrics, followed by an update on our migration to browsertime as our primary tool for browser automation. If you’re interested (and if you have access) you can view the full dashboard.
WordPress 5.8 Beta 4 is now available for testing!
This software is still in development, so it is not recommended to run this version on a production site. Consider setting up a test site to play with it.
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Watch the Make WordPress Core blog for 5.8-related developer notes in the coming weeks, which will break down these and other changes in greater detail.
So far, contributors have fixed 254 tickets in WordPress 5.8, including 91 new features and enhancements, and more bug fixes are on the way.
The first stable release of MyGNUHealth is out.
“Every conversation that you have brings the potential for collaboration,” says Stephen Augustus, Head of Open Source, Cisco.
Augustus recently spoke with Noah Abrahams, Open Source Advocate at StormForge, and co-host Cody Crudgington in a StormForge Fireside Chat, in which they discussed a variety of topics ranging from Kubernetes, open source foundations, corporate support, and open source program offices.
Security updates have been issued by Arch Linux (chromium, dovecot, exiv2, helm, keycloak, libslirp, matrix-appservice-irc, nginx-mainline, opera, pigeonhole, tor, tpm2-tools, and vivaldi), Debian (libgcrypt20), Fedora (pdfbox), Mageia (graphicsmagick, matio, and samba and ldb), openSUSE (dovecot23, gupnp, libgcrypt, live555, and ovmf), SUSE (gupnp, libgcrypt, openexr, and ovmf), and Ubuntu (ceph and rabbitmq-server).
The Google Security Blog announces the release of a schema intended to describe vulnerabilities in a project-independent manner...
In recent months, Google has launched several efforts to strengthen open-source security on multiple fronts. One important focus is improving how we identify and respond to known security vulnerabilities without doing extensive manual work. It is essential to have a precise common data format to triage and remediate security vulnerabilities, particularly when communicating about risks to affected dependencies—it enables easier automation and empowers consumers of open-source software to know when they are impacted and make security fixes as soon as possible.
Google is funding the Internet Security Research Group (ISRG) to sponsor the Rust for Linux organization. Money will be funneled from la GOOG’s bottomless coffers to pay Miguel Ojeda as a full-time developer.
A Software Bill of Materials (SBOM) is a complete, formally structured list of components, libraries, and modules required to build (i.e., compile and link) a given piece of software and the supply chain relationships between them. These components can be open source or proprietary, free or paid, and widely available or restricted access. SBOMs that can be shared without friction between teams and companies are a core part of software management for critical industries and digital infrastructure in the coming decades.
SBOMs are especially critical for a national digital infrastructure used within government agencies and in critical industries that present national security risks if penetrated. SBOMs would improve understanding of those software components’ operational and cyber risks from their originating supply chain.
A policy and process overview of the Linux kernel has identified some “potential pain points” in the handling and signing process of the security keys for the Linux kernel.
The review of the kernel teams’ processes for signing releases and for the policies and procedures for the handling of the signing keys was sought by the Linux Foundation and conducted by cybersecurity experts at the Open Source Technology Improvement Fund (OSTIF) and Trail of Bits.
Business author and expert, H. James Harrington, once said, "If you can't measure something, you can't understand it. If you can't understand it, you can't control it. If you can't control it, you can't improve it." He was right. And Google is following this advice by introducing a new way to strengthen open-source security by introducing a vulnerability interchange schema for describing vulnerabilities across open-source ecosystems.
That's very important. One low-level problem is that there are many security vulnerability databases, there's no standard interchange format. If you want to aggregate information from multiple databases you must handle each one completely separately. That's a real waste of time and energy. At the very least you must create parsers for each database format to merge their data. All this makes systematic tracking of dependencies and collaboration between vulnerability databases much harder than it should be.
A UK nonprofit with ties to global corruption throughout the COVID-19 crisis as well as historical and current ties to the UK eugenics movement launched a global health-focused DARPA equivalent last year. The move went largely unnoticed by both mainstream and independent media.
The Wellcome Trust, which has arguably been second only to Bill Gates in its ability to influence events during the COVID-19 crisis and vaccination campaign, launched its own global equivalent of the Pentagon’s secretive research agency last year, officially to combat the “most pressing health challenges of our time.” Though first conceived of in 2018, this particular Wellcome Trust initiative was spun off from the Trust last May with $300 million in initial funding. It quickly attracted two former DARPA executives, who had previously served in the upper echelons of Silicon Valley, to manage and plan its portfolio of projects.
This global health DARPA, known as Wellcome Leap, seeks to achieve “breakthrough scientific and technological solutions” by or before 2030, with a focus on “complex global health challenges.” The Wellcome Trust is open about how Wellcome Leap will apply the approaches of Silicon Valley and venture capital firms to the health and life science sector. Unsurprisingly, their three current programs are poised to develop incredibly invasive tech-focused, and in some cases overtly transhumanist, medical technologies, including a program exclusively focused on using artificial intelligence (AI), mobile sensors, and wearable brain-mapping tech for children three years old and younger.
This Unlimited Hangout investigation explores not only the four current programs of Wellcome Leap but also the people behind it. The resulting picture is of an incredibly sinister project that poses not only a great threat to current society but to the future of humanity itself. An upcoming Unlimited Hangout investigation will examine the history of the Wellcome Trust along with its role in recent and current events.
