This has been an amazing week for Linux, which turned 30 years old (here’s to you, Linux!), as we saw the release of Linux 5.14 as the next major kernel series, new Linux distro releases like Ubuntu 20.04.3 LTS, LibreELEC 10, and Escuelas Linux 7.1, and big new software releases like OpenShot 2.6 and Qt Creator 5.0.
On top of that, those brave enough to test drive upcoming releases were able to get an early taste of the GNOME 41 desktop environment and MX Linux 21 KDE Plasma edition. You can enjoy these and much more in 9to5Linux’s Linux weekly roundup for August 29th, 2021, below!
**llvm-query** , **llvm-rename** , **clang-tidy** , and **git-clang-format** , from the **d** software series of Slackware.
Why the Linux kernel received so much mainstream attention this week, some of our favorite open-source projects get great updates, and why we're concerned about Linux Foundation members transferring innovation from Linux to closed source software at an industrial scale.
Linus Torvalds has just announced Linux 5.14 release which happens to almost coincide with the anniversary of the initial announcement of the “small” project on August 25, 1991, about 30 years ago. Here’s Linux 5.14’s announcement:
So I realize you must all still be busy with all the galas and fancy balls and all the other 30th anniversary events, but at some point you must be getting tired of the constant glitz, the fireworks, and the champagne. That ball gown or tailcoat isn’t the most comfortable thing, either. The celebrations will go on for a few more weeks yet, but you all may just need a breather from them.
Linux kernel 5.14 contains a wide variety of new features, especially for ARM-based systems. This is all happening despite Linus Torvalds claiming that this is a relatively small release in the initial kernel announcement.
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Last year, the Raspberry Pi Foundation launched the Raspberry Pi 400, a keyboard computer similar to those of the 1980s. Unfortunately, this computer requires a custom kernel version to function due to non-mainline drivers.
However, with the kernel 5.14 release, this appears to have changed. After months of development, the Raspberry Pi 400 can now be booted using the Linux kernel 5.14. While it is unfortunate for support to take this long, it is much better late than never.
Time to put down that cake and try out a new Linux Kernel as Linux 5.14 has been officially released. This release follows shortly after the 30th anniversary of creator Linus Torvalds announcing the project.
From the release announcement Linus Torvalds said "So I realize you must all still be busy with all the galas and fancy balls and all the other 30th anniversary events, but at some point you must be getting tired of the constant glitz, the fireworks, and the champagne. That ball gown or tailcoat isn't the most comfortable thing, either. The celebrations will go on for a few more weeks yet, but you all may just need a breather from them.
And when that happens, I have just the thing for you - a new kernel release to test and enjoy. Because 5.14 is out there, just waiting for you to kick the tires and remind yourself what all the festivities are about.
Linux overlord Linus Torvalds has released version 5.14 of the Linux kernel.
"So I realize you must all still be busy with all the galas and fancy balls and all the other 30th anniversary events, but at some point you must be getting tired of the constant glitz, the fireworks, and the champagne," wrote Torvalds in his weekly state of kernel development update. "The celebrations will go on for a few more weeks yet, but you all may just need a breather from them. And when that happens, I have just the thing for you – a new kernel release to test and enjoy. Because 5.14 is out there, just waiting for you to kick the tires and remind yourself what all the festivities are about.
"Of course, the poor tireless kernel maintainers won't have time for the festivities, because for them, this just means that the merge window will start tomorrow. We have another 30 years to look forward to, after all.
Despite three decades of steady evolution, longstanding Linux myths persist.
Linux Kernel 5.14 has been released.
Announcing the latest kernels arrival on the Linux Kernel mailing list Linux founder Linus Torvalds couldn’t resist acknowledging the exuberant attention his ‘hobby’ project has received for its 30th anniversary over the past few days, remarking:
“I realize you must all still be busy with all the galas and fancy balls and all the other 30th anniversary events, but at some point you must be getting tired of the constant glitz, the fireworks, and the champagne. That ball gown or tailcoat isn’t the most comfortable thing, either. The celebrations will go on for a few more weeks yet, but you all may just need a breather from them.”
Quite so, Linus! Quite so!
So what goodies await us this time?
Let’s take a look…
Ingo Molnar began sending in his pull requests bright and early as usual for the just-opened Linux 5.15 merge window. With the scheduler changes for this next kernel version there are some improvements worth mentioning but also worth mentioning is what hasn't found its way to the kernel yet: any software optimizations around Intel Thread Director for upcoming Alder Lake processors.
The new scheduler material for Linux 5.15 includes changes for dealing with asymmetric scheduling affinity. This asymmetric scheduling affinity is initially focused around handling of 32-bit tasks on AArch64 systems where some SoCs are having AArch64-only cores not capable of 32-bit (AArch32) execution. The scheduling changes allow defining their own CPU possible mask for tasks to ensure the scheduler will place a given task on a CPU that supports it. Again, initially all focused on the Arm front with legacy 32-bit tasks for some SoCs having 64-bit-only cores.
Worked on for more than one year is the patches out of Amazon for allowing opt-in L1 data cache flushing on context switching. This L1d flushing is done in the name of greater security given the various CPU speculative execution hardware vulnerabilities these days and protecting against other possible future vulnerabilities. After trying to get the code merged last summer, Linus Torvalds called it "beyond stupid" and reverted the code but now for Linux 5.15 a revised form of it was submitted.
One of the very first pull requests for Linux 5.15 now that its merge window is open following the Linux 5.14 release is to merge KSMBD, the in-kernel SMB3 protocol file server.
KSMBD is an in-kernel SMB3 server developed by Samsung and focused on delivering high performance and new features. Features around RDMA usage is one of the areas KSMBD is planning to embrace as it can be more easily achieved via kernel space rather than the large Samba project in user-space. KSMBD aims to have a much smaller footprint in general than the well known Samba project for SMB/CIFSS support on Linux and other non-Windows platforms.
ProtonVPN is a Swiss-based multi-platform open-source VPN service popular for its spectacular GUI, convenience for connecting to other routers, and strict no-log policy.
If you are familiar with ProtonMail, then you might be excited to know that it is the same team of scientists, cryptographers, and engineers that is behind both applications.
Unlike a lot of other VPN services, ProtonVPN has security and privacy as its main focus and this is the reason why it learns from working with activists and journalists in the field. It sends all user traffic first through its core network in privacy-friendly countries e.g., Iceland and Switzerland so that even if a VPN endpoint server is compromised, users’ true IP addresses will remain hidden.
Ripple is the native cryptocurrency for products developed by Ripple Labs. Its products are used for payment settlement, asset exchange, and remittance systems that work more like SWIFT, a service for international money and security transfers used by a network of banks and financial intermediaries. Ripple wallet. Check openssl.
Ripple is pre-mined and uses a less complicated mining method as compared to Bitcoin.
As a relatively isolated junior sysadmin, I remember seeing answers on Experts Exchange and later Stack Exchange that baffled me. Authors and commenters might chain 10 commands together with pipes and angle brackets—something I never did in day-to-day system administration. Honestly, I doubted the real-world value of that. Surely, this was just an exercise in e-braggadocio, right?
Trying to read the man pages for the utilities most frequently seen in these extended command chains didn't make them seem more approachable, either. For example, the sed man page weighs in at around 1,800 words alone without ever really explaining how regular expressions work or the most common uses of sed itself.
If you find yourself in the same boat, grab a beverage and buckle in. Instead of giving you encyclopedic listings of every possible argument and use case for each of these ubiquitous commands, we're going to teach you how to think about them—and how to easily, productively incorporate them in your own daily command-line use.
In web development you will often need to connect/communicate with other web servers to get information/data. For example, when signing up for a new account on some websites you will often see an option to sign up using your Gmail or other third party accounts. This enables you to sign up for a new account with just a single click instead of manually filling out the whole form. When you select the “sign up using a third party account” option then the application communicates with the third party application’s server and sends a request to access your information that is stored there. This request is sent through API which is a set of rules that govern how different applications or systems communicate with each other. In this article we will learn to use JavaScript to send such requests.
This guide explains how to set up MariaDB high-availability cluster for the database using the Galera library, which provides a virtual mater-to-master three-node cluster running on Debian or Ubuntu Linux.
One of the biggest challenges Linux users often face is related to Wifi. This is because Wifidrivers are often missing in the kernel. Resultantly, users have to face various issues related to “Wifi not working.” These issues are more common if you are using non-Intel Wifi modules. In this guide, we will be addressing all the major connectivity issues on Ubuntu-based Linux distros so that you can get back online as soon as possible.
Zettlr is a fantastic markdown editor for Linux, Mac, and Windows. It has a lot of really useful features, such as support for YAML, citations, support for LaTeX, etc. In this guide, we’ll go over how to set up Zettlr on Linux.
R is a programming language that is mostly used for statistical computing, data mining, and graphics. RStudio is an Open Source and free-to-use integrated development environment (IDE) for R.
In user-interface design and human-computer interaction, copy-paste are operations that provide an interprocess communication mechanism for moving data via the user interface of a system. The copy command duplicates the data and saves it to temporary storage (the clipboard). Then this data from the clipboard is pasted into the desired location. The copied data is accessible to any program that supports the functionality and allows itself to transfer data easily.
You may need to write long commands or sentences obtained in a file or on the internet while working on the Ubuntu terminal. You can save your precious time by utilizing copy-pasting techniques rather than entering them word by word. Using the standard keyboard commands Ctrl+c and Ctrl+v, you may have copied and pasted text multiple times in your Ubuntu Graphical User Applications such as LibreOffice, Gedit, OpenOffice. However, you may be surprised to learn that many common keyboard shortcuts do not work in Ubuntu Terminal.
Jitsi Meet is an open-source video-conferencing service without any privacy concerns. Here's how to install it on your Linux system.
More of us are working remotely now than ever before. Not only that, many of us have attended everything from online book discussions to digital concerts and parties. Often all of this takes place over Zoom, a proprietary app that can feel problematic to some Linux users.
But you’re not stuck dependent on this one service. There’s a free and open-source alternative that doesn’t come with the downsides of being beholden to just one profit-driven company. And its name is Jitsi Meet.
One or more of your programs or processes may hang from time to time while using Ubuntu. In this situation, you find yourself looking for methods to conveniently, quickly, and safely halt the unresponsive processes and applications because restarting your system is not always the best solution. This article will show you how I find and kill a process in Ubuntu using both the command line and Ubuntu User Interface. Before jumping into that, firstly, we will check out a brief introduction of a process:
In the era of globalization, we can not do anything without the internet. On the web, we need to create accounts for tons of websites for business, office, and personal work. Creating accounts is not the problem; it provides a strong password and remembers them for each website. There are many free, paid, self-hosted password managers available on the web. 1password is one of the best and most used paid password managers for Android, Windows, and Linux. It uses strong hash encrypted passwords for securing the logins and allows to share password volts with others.
In this tutorial you will learn how to install Flatpak on various Linux distros.
Atom is a free and open-source text and source code editor that supports many cross-platforms such as macOS, Linux, and Microsoft Windows with support for plug-ins written in JavaScript and embedded Git Control, developed by GitHub.
The catchphrase that Atom calls itself is the “hackable text editor for the 21st century”. Atom, compared to competitors, is more user-friendly, with plenty of options for extensions to add syntax highlighting for languages and formats, add dynamic linting, and integrate debuggers, runtime environments, and video and music player controls, and much more.
In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install the latest version of Atom Text Editor on your Debian 11 Bullseye operating system.
Learn the simple steps to connect any Amazon ec2 Instance via SSH and Putty client on Windows 11, 10, or 7 operation systems…
Are you using Ubuntu or any other Linux such as CentOS, Fedora, Mint, and want to connect to Amazon cloud running ec2 Instance, then here are the steps to follow.
Yarn is a fast, secure, and reliable NODE package manager that enables you to automate the installation, configuring, updating, and removing of npm packages. Yarn parallelizes the system operations to enhance resource utilization and it caches downloaded packages to save bandwidth. Yarn is secure, it verifies the integrity of each installed package by using checksums before executing its code. It is very reliable due to its detailed but concise lock file format, it ensures that an install that works on a machine will exactly perform in the same way on another machine.
In this tutorial, I will explain the installation procedure of Yarn on Ubuntu 20.04 distribution. Moreover, we will also discuss the yarn basics and some useful commands.
The Domain Name System helps you get where you want to be on the internet. Make sure you know what it is and how to set up, configure, and test it.
Linus Torvalds announced the Linux Kernel 5.14 after few weeks of development and is available for general usage with new features, improvements, and better hardware support.
As per Linus Torvalds for Kernel 5.14
I have just the thing for you – a new kernel release to test and enjoy. Because 5.14 is out there, just waiting for you to kick the tires and remind yourself what all the festivities are about.
This tutorial will be helpful for beginners to install Linux kernel 5.14 in Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, Ubuntu 20.10, Ubuntu 18.04 LTS, and LinuxMint 20.1.
Bagisto is a free and open-source e-commerce platform. It is built on various open source technologies such Laravel (PHP framework) and Vue.js.
Bagisto enables merchants to launch their own shopping cart system with a wide variety of fully controllable features. Its features include multistore inventory system, orders management, customer cart, product review, wishlist, theme, CMS pages, responsive, multiple currencies, and more.
Java is one of the well-liked computer programming languages to develop PC or mobile apps and is available on various platforms. There are many applications that require Java on your system to function. Apart from that, there are billions of mobile devices that run Java and around 9 million developers who prefer Java to create applications.
If you are a developer and a Linux user then Java is an important component to have on your system, it will not only help you to create applications but also assist in running thousands of apps and games that require Java. This write-up is a guide to install Java on the latest release of Debian known as Bullseye.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Apache Web Server on Debian 11. For those of you who didn’t know, Apache is an extensively used open-source web server also referred to as an Apache HTTP server. It is a free cross-platform web server that is supported on various operating systems including Microsoft Windows, Linux, macOS, and many more. Developers prefer Apache for its speed, security, reliability, robustness, and ease of customization. In addition, Apache is able to meet the needs of many environments as it allows the installation of various extensions and modules.
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 Apache Web Server on a Debian 11 (Bullseye).
When working with Bash scripts, you may end up in a situation where you have to process a series of inputs using the same command. Fortunately, there is a way in Bash to achieve this in a more optimal way using HereDoc.
HereDoc, acronym for Here Document, is an input Redirection method to pass multiple inputs to a program or command. The concept of heredoc is not exclusively related to Bash alone. Many popular programming languages like Perl, Ruby, PHP support heredoc.
In this article, we will take a look at the syntax and usage of heredoc with some real-world use cases. All the examples in this article are created to be simple, so even a newbie can understand this concept easily. Let’s jump in and start playing with heredoc in Bash.
Hello Geeks, when we install Debian Linux on our system then during the installation it tries to get DHCP ip address from modem (or dhcp server) if available. But it is always to recommended to have a static IP address on your system. In this post, we will cover how to configure static IPv4 address in Debian 11 (Bullseye). In Debian Linux, there are two ways to set or configure static IP address.
In Linux, everything is considered as files and organized inside directories. lsof (List of Open File) displays a list of files that are opened. It mainly helps to find out the information about the process which opened the files. Apart from files, it can list a directory, a block special file, a shared library, a character special file, a regular pipe, a named pipe, an internet socket, a UNIX domain socket, and many others.
In this tutorial, we learn about lsof command in Linux using easy-to-understand examples.
One of the most important Linux system security feature are passwords today. Most of server administrator and users use password to secure their system to get access by others. In Linux (RHEL/DEBIAN) these passwords are saved in passwd and shadow files in /etc directory. In deep description about passwd and shadow both file’s data encrypted.
Most distro uses one way encryption called DES (Data Encryption Standard) to encrypt passwords saved into /etc/passwd and /etc/shadow files. When you attempt the login the username and password, the password encrypted again and compare with saved password, if match found then you are allowed to access otherwise decline by the system.
The ls command is one of the basic and most used commands that any Linux user/you should know. you can use to list information about files and directories within the Linux/Unix file system.
The ls command in Linux is pre-installed on all Linux/Unix based distributions (Operating System).
I believe, you must know, how to use ls command when you get into the command prompt of Linux Operating System.
In this tutorial, I will show you how to use the ls command in Linux with appropriate practical examples.
I will try to provide you a piece of detailed information with explanations of the most common ls options.
Again ls is a Linux shell command that lists directory contents of files and directories.
We are discussing about Penetration Testing Tutorial and this article under section cracking passwords and hashes cracking.
Atom is the most popular free and open-source text editor for Linux, Windows and macOS. It is also used as source code editor and can also work as IDE (Integrated Development Environment). Atom is developed and maintained by GitHub Inc. It supports more than 30 programing language and multiple panes. It also supports smart auto-completion which helps developers to code faster. Atom has built in package manager through which coders can install new package and can also create their own.
In this post, we will cover how to install Atom text editor in Debian 11 desktop. Following are minimum requirements of Atom Text editor.
The name MySQL needs no introduction. Most database administrators and users are well aware of its robustness, efficiency, and reliability as an effective RDBMS (Relational Database Management System).
The MySQL attribute; reliability, is just a name unless fully exploited and implemented. The reliability of the MySQL security metric is dependent on several administrative aspects. One of them is the management of existing database users and their individual permission levels.
Email communication will continue to be a significant aspect of most of our lives even beyond the foreseeable future. For an ordinary Linux user, this type of communication is key as they can easily install, configure, and use GUI email clients like Thunderbird to meet their emailing objectives.
On the other hand, there is another type of Linux user; the superuser – This user has perfected the use of the Linux operating system terminal environment to the extent of not needing the graphical user interface (GUI) anymore. Such users spend most of their time on the Linux terminal or command line environment.
This article will explore how to filter the updates available to your Fedora Linux system by type. This way you can choose to, for example, only install security or bug fixes updates. This article will demo running the dnf commands inside toolbox instead of using a real Fedora Linux install.
You might also want to read Use dnf updateinfo to read update changelogs before reading this article.
I have a printer in my office, but sometimes I work on my laptop in another room of the house. This isn't a problem for me for two reasons. First of all, I rarely print anything on paper and have gone months without using the printer. Secondly, though, I've set the printer to be shared over my home network, so I can send files to print from anywhere in the house. I didn't need any special equipment for this setup. It's accomplished with just my usual Linux computer and the Common Unix Printing System (CUPS).
Red Hat JBoss Web Server combines a web server (Apache HTTPD), a servlet engine (Apache Tomcat), and modules for load balancing (mod_jk and mod_cluster). Ansible is one of the best automation tools on the market. In this article, we'll use Ansible to completely automate the deployment of a JBoss Web Server instance on a freshly installed Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) server.
Ready for some hacking? Midnight Protocol, the strategic RPG from LuGus Studios and Iceberg Interactive is seeing a slight delay to the release but there's a new trailer and demo up.
Set in the near-future it's a narrative-driven game about being a hacktivist in a world filled with "labour automation, big data, controversial AI applications, legal grey zones, and the nebulous nature of online identity" - so pretty much where we are now right? You are known as 'Data' and you recently got doxxed with a "shadowy branch of government" out to get you. Check out the new trailer:
Here's a fresh one for you - Cursed Letters is a first-person stealth horror game with retro visuals from Aeternum Ludos. We briefly mentioned Cursed Letters little over a year ago when it didn't yet have a release. Now though you can try an actual demo to get a feel for the full release that's due in October.
The developer explains they're trying to get something that has a mixture of elements from Outlast and Silent Hill, with their own unique spin to give a new "slasher horror game". Expect plenty of gore, strong language and everything like that.
"What would you do if you had lost your father, and your brother sent you a strange letter telling you that he can bring him back to life?
Nearly six years after release, the traffic-management building sim Mini Metro has another wonderful update out to pull you back in to play hours more.
"In Mini Metro, you take on the task of designing the subway layout for a rapidly expanding city. Your city starts with three stations. Draw routes between these stations to connect them with subway lines. Commuters travel along your lines to get around the city as fast as they can. Each station can only hold a handful of waiting commuters so your subway network will need to be well-designed to avoid delays."
Not a recent game, I know. Max Payne 3 has been silently waiting for me for a long time. It was there, right in my backlog, secretly hoping I would select it as I was browsing other games to play until recently. And finally, unexpectedly, its turn came. And Boy, should I have tried it out much earlier!
Primordia, a popular point and click adventure created by Wormwood Studios and originally released in 2012 has officially been released natively for Linux. The developer also previously released their newest title Strangeland for Linux recently.
"Set in a post-apocalyptic world strewn with cast-off machines, Primordia tells the story of Horatio Nullbuilt, a stoic robot who values his solitude and independence. Horatio spends his days studying the Book of Man, sparring with his droid companion Crispin, and tinkering with the airship they call home — a peaceful existence that becomes threatened when a rogue robot steals the energy source that the pair needs to survive."
A deep, text-heavy strategic RPG is what awaits you in Vagrus - The Riven Realms and it's going to be hitting the big 1.0 on October 5 as it leaves Early Access.
You play as a Vagrus, a caravan leader who is tasked with travelling all over a completely ruined post-apocalyptic fantasy world that was completely messed up by humans and gods so now plenty of horrors await. It's a mixture of many types of gameplay. There's resource and people management, open-world exploration, trading, turn-based tactical battles and a whole lot of lore to read through
Meeting KDE people again was a lot of fun. Actually sitting at a table together makes a big difference in understanding each other. Arjen and David pushed and prodded me to do some KDE System Monitor work for FreeBSD, which has now landed upstream. Aleix and I talked about Calamares in OEM mode. Harald complained about a lack of coffee. Leinir introduced me to Schwip Schwap, which seems like a terrible idea but isn’t.
GNOME continue building up their ecosystem and their marketing game too with the launch of a new "Apps for GNOME" website to help people get involved and discover more.
Worth reminding people that GNOME is much more than just a desktop environment. The GNOME project covers a lot from toolkits for building applications, the desktop environment, window manager, low-level system stuff and much more. There's also the GNOME Foundation, which has an aim to get GNOME stuff out there into the world and support the whole thing.
Apps for GNOME is designed to show off their "Core Apps", which are those usually pre-installed with Linux distributions using GNOME and are created directly by the GNOME team. There's also the "Circle Apps" which is basically a showcase of applications built with GNOME tech and then there's the "Development Apps" for people who want to get involved directly by making their own applications.
Getting close to our 4year birthday here and what more reason to celebrate than cutting one more tie to the IBM’s monolythic bloatware that is shoved down our throats by agents of dependence and control.
Thank to the revamping of Kiss and its new commitment to independence, to offer a way to such independence, we noticed a tragic neglect of reality. We started talking about independence from systemd, and all we thought it was necessary was to substitute pid1 for an alternative. Some pre-existed and worked, some fresher were hardly tried.Then came the substitution to logind by consolekit2.
Then came the realization that not using systemd init, but using dbus and elogind, was the next worst thing to be doing, and while more and more non-systemd distros (on our long list) didn’t use systemd, they used or later adopted elogind (void slackware and our beloved adelie). So beyond pid1 those systems were business as usual. So we focused on the next best alternative, consolekit2 (which is recently receiving fresh attention) or not using it and dbus at all, which is fine for most of us wm users.
 Zorin is a distribution which I feel is doing a lot of things right, both technologically and from an infrastructure point of view. The project is offering three main editions: Lite for people with less capable machines, Core for users who want basic desktop features, and Pro for people who want more options and commercial support. The project offers both full features and minimal installs and also offers to collect hardware information while making it easy to skip this step in the installer.
Once we have picked an edition the installer is easy to navigate, the welcome screen offers access to several key features without being long and tedious. The default layout will be familiar to most computer users while still being blissfully easy to adjust.
There is a lot of software included in the Normal collection of packages, most of it easy to use, beginner friendly, and fairly mainstream. There are a lot of nice features in the Pro version such as the note taking application, screen casting, Barrier tool for multi-device coordination, and Zorin Connect. The Software portal, while a touch slow to respond at times, does a good job of connecting us with classic Deb packages along with optional Snap and Flatpak packages. This gives us a huge range of up to date software.
I was pleasantly impressed with Zorin's performance, hardware detection, ease of setting up the distribution, and convenient settings. Perhaps best of all, I didn't run into any serious issues or errors. Zorin was stable, fast, and solid. The distribution does what it says in the documentation and release announcement, and does it well without any hiccups. This is probably the best distribution I have run so far this year for most Linux users, but particularly those new to Linux. Zorin OS tries to make the migration from Windows (or macOS) as painless as possible as does a good job of being both familiar and offering a better experience than the platforms it seeks to replace.
EndeavourOS, my absolute favourite way to easily install Arch Linux with a couple nice extras has continued growing and there's a brand new ISO download with plenty of improvements.
Unlike Manjaro which bundles updates together here and there for big releases, EndeavourOS sticks very closely to Arch Linux directly. The idea is to give users who know somewhat know how Linux works to get an easy way to install Arch and it certainly does the job nicely. They do also add in a few small extras like themes, a couple helper applications and things like that - nothing huge but it does make a difference.
They also provide a new eos-apps-info application, which lists all of their own applications that allows you to get a manual for each with clear instructions on exactly what they do. There's a bunch of new community wallpapers but the biggest change is to the Calamares installer.
For those after an easy-to-use desktop distribution built off Arch Linux, Endeavour OS continues filling the void left by the former Antergos project. Endeavour OS is closing out August by releasing new ISOs that include a number of updates to its installer.
Endeavour OS is one of many Linux distributions using the common Calamares installer framework. Endeavour's Calamares installer was one of the main focuses for this release. When using the auto partitioning of the installer, it now allows the Btrfs file-system to be selected with the possibility to create a file-system with a sub-volume scheme. EXT4 continues to be supported for auto partitioning but the Btrfs support is increasing, just like we have been seeing across the distribution landscape.
4MLinux 38.0 BETA is ready for testing. Basically, at this stage of development, 4MLinux BETA has the same features as 4MLinux STABLE, but it provides a huge number of updated packages.
In this post we take a look at some of the frequently asked questions (FAQ) about Linux and the GNU General Public License (GPL). We'll be updating this from time to time as we get more questions.
Thirty years ago you might catch the video for R.E.M.'s "Losing My Religion" on MTV, decide you want to buy a copy and pick up your house phone to call a friend to take you to the nearest record store and hope they had it in stock. Today you can just dial up the video on your phone and text your friend about it. That's in large part because of two other things that happened in 1991: The release of the Linux kernel and the second version of the GNU General Public License (GPLv2).
It's, perhaps, a little more complicated than that, but the fact is that a huge swath of technologies we depend on are directly tied to those events. Let's take a step back and talk about those events and what they've enabled.
[...]
Free software conveys four "freedoms" to users: The freedom to run, copy, study/improve and distribute a work.
In short, this means that if you are given a GPL'ed program you can run it without restriction. You can copy it for a friend, you can tinker with it and improve it, and you can distribute those changes.
You get a copy of Fedora Workstation and you want to run it? Go for it. It's explicitly allowed by the GPL (and other free and open source licenses included with a copy of Fedora).
Want to make a copy for a friend? Go for it. Want to dig in and see how it works? That's also allowed.
Fix a bug in a program and want to share that fix? You can do that, too. However, there's a slight catch in that distributing GPL'ed software comes with some added responsibilities.
Today, many Linux users would be shocked to know that there was once a lawsuit aimed squarely at Linux's heart: Its intellectual property. Some people at the time even thought SCO's lawsuit against IBM might end Linux. They were wrong. But, for years the case dragged its way through the courts. Now, one part of that case may really and truly be disappearing.
One of the most active areas of the cloud-native landscape is projects related to security in various ways. As has been the case historically, these new security projects tackle specific aspects of security; the security tool that handles everything is a dream that’s never been realized.
Here, we explore five open source tools that aim to help teams working with the DevSecOps approach, wherein IT organizations treat security security as a shared responsibility, integrated from end-to-end, rather than a responsibility that gets done late in the development process. Tools such as these often get fully integrated into commercial Kubernetes platforms such as Red Hat’s OpenShift as they mature. However, for now, these projects offer a nice window into innovation happening in the security space and the opportunity to give them a try as a complement to OpenShift.
Just about every company understands the importance of digital transformation in 2021. From surging online consumer activity to the digital tools that can drastically improve communication, collaboration, and productivity, it’s clear that the companies that fail to digitize their operations and services will be at a severe competitive disadvantage.
But for a company’s digital transformation work to be deemed successful, you will need to assess several key performance indicators. An effective digital transformation isn’t a box companies can check: It’s an ongoing process that requires constant evaluation and adjustment.
During Debconf, Holger, who’s one of the developers-reference maintainers, made a quick presentation that was explaining the developers-reference needs some love. Indeed, it has gathered dust, and some useful refresh would be very welcome.
While Canonical is still working hard to finish the last details of the forthcoming Ubuntu 21.10 (Impish Indri) release, which will see the light of day on October 14th, 2021, they are already planning on the next major release, Ubuntu 22.04.
But Ubuntu 22.04 will not be an ordinary release. In fact, it will be the next LTS (Long-Term Support) series, supported for at least 5 years, and, according to the release schedule published by Brian Murray, development will kick off with the usual toolchain upload just a week after the release of Ubuntu 21.10, on October 21st.
The Helix 300 Series can be configured with Windows or Linux Ubuntu operating systems and can be paired with OnLogic's suite of OEM services, including custom branding, software imaging, custom fulfilment services, and lifecycle management support, according to the release.
Software inevitably fails and, when it does (or ideally some time before it does), your observability stack will alert you. But failures cascade through systems, and one root cause ends up having many symptoms on different related systems and, as such, many alerts are fired. When the alerts fired at your pager are many and more keep coming in, you have an alert storm. Colloquially, an alert storm is that phenomenon that occurs when multiple interrelated alerts get triggered in quick succession. Often, these alerts have a common cause, or they are at least closely related. For example: imagine that a Cassandra cluster goes down that alone will trigger one or more alerts in the monitoring of the cluster, and very likely alerts from the applications that rely on that cluster.This means that alerts spread to the applications that rely on the applications that rely on the Cassandra cluster and before you know it, everything looks like it is on fire and it becomes difficult to identify a starting point for the troubleshooting.
Alert storms have severe short and long-term implications for the teams facing them. In the short-term, a continuously-firing pager distracts you while you are fire-fighting, and it feels like someone is pouring gasoline on a bonfire. Then there is the cognitive overload of deciding which fire to put out first, trying to discern cause from effect, and decision making under duress is not trivial. Long-term, teams develop alert fatigue: the more alerts one is exposed to over time, and the less meaningful each of those alerts is (“Yes, I already know the cluster is bricked!”), the less likely the operators will be quick to jump to the firefighting (“That thing is borked more often than not anyhow”). Over time, issues get underestimated or outright overlooked. Beyond the dip in operational readiness, alert fatigue has serious personal implications for the people experiencing it.
Open source software, as the name suggests, is developed in the open. The software can be freely inspected by anyone, and can be freely patched as required to suit the security requirements of the organisation running it. Any publicly identified security issues are centrally triaged and tracked. Associated software patches are also developed and distributed in a coordinated manner. The process is based on broad collaboration between government agencies, open source software vendors, security researchers, community contributors and oftentimes the obligations set forth in the widely adopted GPL open source software license.
Platform as a Service (PaaS) solutions, generally speaking, are developed as proprietary, black-box solutions. Whilst the software offered by the PaaS solution is sometimes free open source software, the provisioning and management solution surrounding the software is almost always proprietary to the PaaS vendor. The customer may have little to no visibility into the provisioning and management engine codebase and the problems that might exist therein, and is likely to depend on the PaaS vendor to fulfill many of their security obligations.
PaaS providers have maintained an excellent security posture for many years. Exploits are rare, and when they are identified, the vendor’s response is usually rapid and decisive. But PaaS is still a relatively new technology in terms of general adoption, and where an exploit in PaaS is identified, its scope can be quite devastating for users of the service in question.
“ChaosDB” for example, was a privilege escalation vulnerability identified on the popular Microsoft Azure CosmosDB platform, that potentially allowed attackers to gain access to database instances that had the “Jupyter Notebook” feature enabled. Whilst Microsoft acted responsibly and rapidly addressed the threat presented by ChaosDB, it is nevertheless an example of a PaaS vulnerability with potentially broad scope and far reaching consequences. I believe Microsoft acted commendably, but Microsoft also has the scale and the resources to be able to act in a decisive manner – something smaller or less experienced PaaS vendors might struggle to do.
Banana Pi BPI-R2 Pro is an update to the Banana Pi BPI R2 router board that replaces MediaTek MT7623A quad-core ARM Cortex-A7 processor with a much more powerful Rockchip RK3568 quad-core Cortex-A55 processor.
The Banana Pi BPI-R2 Pro board looks very similar to the first generation R2 board with the same dimensions, 2GB RAM, HDMI & DSI display interfaces, five Gigabit Ethernet ports, one SATA port, two USB 3.0 ports, and one mPCIe socket, but it also adds one M.2 socket, support for MIPI CSI cameras, and extra storage with a 16GB eMMC flash.
Magicbit board joins other ESP32 platforms for the STEM education market such as the Crowbits Master Kit or ESP32-based Micro:bit clones with visual programming and Arduino and/or MicroPython support, a mobile app, and training materials such as project tutorials and online courses.
Magicbit is designed to be wire-free with the hexagonal board offering four module’s connectors, an OLED display, buttons, a buzzer, and more. You can still use cables if you’d like with six crocodile clip holes and an expansion connector.
Zulip is an open-source collaboration platform that pitches itself as a better replacement to Slack. Let us take a closer look.
Messaging and collaboration platforms make a big difference when it comes to your work.
While there are several options available, Slack is a popular one used by many organizations. But, what about an open-source alternative to Slack that you can self-host?
Zulip is one such software.
If you like to explore the internet and spending time searching and looking for different topics and interests, then you probably have a large collection of links, websites and articles. You certainly need a solution to organize this collection. Well, LinkAce is your answer.
LinkAce is a free open-source self-hosted bookmarking archiving and collection solution. It is designed with the primary goal to help users store, archive, tag and classify their bookmarks with ease.
The project is created by Kavin Woblick an open-source developer and enthusiast from Germany.
If you remember or were an enthusiastic user of Del.icio.us; the bookmark sharing social network, then you must remember the sad news of how it shut down, and the data lost for thousands of users who could not back up their bookmarks.
Then you will appreciate keeping your data save on your own server with LinkAce.
LinkAce is effortless to setup and use. It comes with a responsive user interface. It supports multiple users who can create their own lists (collections), tag their bookmarks, share them and keep updated with the freshly added links.
It is an outstanding solution for teams, communities even family members and a nice approach to keep your bookmarks private and safe.
ONLYOFFICE has released version 6.4 of the ONLYOFFICE Docs, available in ONLYOFFICE Workspace, for integration with Sync&Share services like Nextcloud and ownCloud, and as a collaborative suite for web applications in production.
The new version of the online editors includes new editing features, improved integration mechanisms, better accessibility and collaboration. Let’s see what’s new around the suite.
WOPI support. Developers can now use Web Application Open Platform Interface (WOPI) to integrate ONLYOFFICE Docs. The protocol defines operations that let a web client, such as office software, to access and change files stored on the server. WOPI allows developers who want to integrate ONLYOFFICE Docs to enable office document editing and co-editing within their solutions easily, without writing separate integration apps.
The announcement of LibreOffice 7.2 has got a large media coverage in many geographies. This is a list of some of the most significant articles in English.
The latest user guide from the LibreOffice documentation team is Writer Guide 7.2, available in free PDF, ODT, or to read in a browser. Low-cost printed copies coming soon. Visit the Documentation page on the LibreOffice website for links.
Shape properties were shared by shape type (e.g. shared between group shapes) before insertion into a document model in Impress. This is now fixed: the property names and types are still shared to help performance, but their values are no longer shared. This helps matching the user expectation that separate opened documents don’t share information with each other.
First, thanks to our partner SUSE for working with Collabora to make this possible.
With the CovPass app, the EU digital COVID certificate for Corona vaccination can be used on smartphones. Until today, it was only available on Apple, Huawai and Google app stores due to proprietary dependencies. The support team of the CovPass app also argued that the app cannot be published in other app stores due to security reasons and to prevent misuse. This argumentation is not only misleading and wrong, as we have already seen with other Corona apps, but prevents the use of many Corona apps for people who value privacy and software freedom on their devices. A group of volunteers worked heavily in the past weeks to make this app available to everyone and released it today on F-Droid, a Free Software app store.
To do so, the volunteers also removed proprietary Google libraries which are not necessary for the app to function. This additional work could have been prevented if the CovPass developers (who are paid with public funds) would not include such unnecessary proprietary libraries from the beginning. Furthermore, the company developing CovPass was unsupportive towards external developers, which increased the difficulty for the volunteers to contribute improvements. Because of this, improvements which would have required little effort by the original developers turned out to be a difficult task for volunteers. A positive example is the COVID Certificate, the official app for storing and presenting Swiss COVID certificates. It was developed by the Federal Office of Information Technology, Systems and Telecommunication (FOITT) on behalf of the Federal Office of Public Health, and the developers made sure to include the app in the Free Software app store F-Droid themselves.
If you’d like to explore a more advanced program that demonstrates a few of these interesting features, here’s a simple “guess the number” game, updated to use ncurses. The program picks a random number in a range, then asks the user to make repeated guesses until they find the secret number. As the user makes their guess, the program lets them know if the guess was too low or too high.
Note that this program limits the possible numbers from 0 to 7. Keeping the values to a limited range of single-digit numbers makes it easier to use getch() to read a single number from the user. I also used the getrandom kernel system call to generate random bits, masked with the number 7 to pick a random number from 0 (binary 0000) to 7 (binary 0111).
Vulkan 1.2.190 resolves several issues with the specification, but most exciting with this routine Vulkan API update is the introduction of two new extensions.
The extensions introduced with Vulkan 1.2.190 are VK_KHR_shader_integer_dot_product and VK_EXT_primitive_topology_list_restart.
Today, my hotkeys on my Thinkbook 15 ITL Gen2 stopped working.
There was no obvious reason why. I typed “hotkey” into the search and opened the Lenovo Hotkeys app, and then a box came up, checked by default, asking if I wanted to send usage reports back to Lenovo. So I unchecked the box, and clicked Continue, and my hotkeys work again.
Trend Micro Incorporated (TYO: 4704; TSE: 4704), a global cybersecurity leader, today released new research on the state of Linux security in the first half of 2021. The report gives valuable insight into how Linux operating systems are being targeted as organizations increase their digital footprint in the cloud and the pervasive threats that make up the Linux threat landscape.
Over the past few weeks, the Taliban have taken control of substantially the whole of Afghanistan, with just Kabul Airport and the Panjshir Valley presently controlled by the US Military and the National Resistance Front of Afghanistan respectively.
Yet the situation with Afghanistan’s internet infrastructure is quite different to what anyone following the mainstream media might reasonably expect, as Afghanistan’s key internet resources – domains, IP addresses, routing and government communications – are controlled by a diverse set of entities subject to Western jurisdictions.
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PCH & Gransy therefore control the resolution of .af domain names, and may choose to honour or ignore DNS changes that the Taliban might make. To keep the DNS operational, the Taliban is dependent on maintaining the goodwill of PCH and Gransy, who appear to be operating an entirely pro bono DNS service for the country.
However, during the Taliban’s previous administration Internet access was prohibited on moral grounds. Were the Taliban to revert to this position and decide that .af should be emptied, it would have no need of any DNS nor goodwill.
Should that situation arise, PCH and Gransy are in a position to keep the .af domains running, unless or until the Taliban have the credentials for a control panel at IANA, to change the name servers for the ccTLD. The Taliban could contact IANA and ask for a change of control, as happened when control of Afghanistan last changed; however IANA is based in Los Angeles, and requests for ccTLD redelegation must demonstrate that the requested change “serves the local Internet community’s interest”.
The district court dismissed USR’s patent infringement complaint, holding of all four asserted patents were ineligible under the abstract idea test incorporated into 35 U.S.C. €§ 101. On appeal, the Federal Circuit has affirmed. U.S. Patent Nos. 8,856,539; 8,577,813; 9,100,826; and 9,530,137.
The patents here are directed to technology for securing electronic payment transactions. This is an area of technology that the Federal Circuit has previously addressed. Here, the court notes that cases “often turn[] on whether the claims provide sufficient specificity to constitute an improvement to computer functionality itself.” Slip Op. Note that this statement from the court has two specific requirements: (1) that the claims be drafted with specificity; and (2) that the element claimed by an “improvement to computer functionality.” Generic claims are not enough; neither are specific claim limitations directed toward elements already well known in the art.
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As you’ll see, the court’s conclusions in Alice Step One (conventional actions in a generic way) fully answer Alice Step Two as well. The court particularly notes that time-varying codes were already well known in the field. Further, this case of using a third-party intermediary is also well known and an abstract idea itself.
In academic settings, objective indicia of non-obviousness are sometimes presented as a common way of rebutting contentions that a claimed invention is obvious. These indicia, set forth in Graham v. John Deere Co. and reiterated in KSR Int'l Co. v. Teleflex, Inc., include commercial success, long felt but unsolved needs, unexpected results, copying by others, industry praise, and failure of others. While aesthetically pleasing from a procedural point of view, secondary considerations are notoriously difficult to successfully apply outside of law school exams.
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Oren provided a mapping of its commercial product to the claims of its patent, and this mapping was sufficient to conclude that the product was what was being claimed. Proppant argued that a broader version of the product with more features was responsible for any commercial success. This argument was enough for the PTAB to conclude that the commercial success was primarily a result of the non-claimed features.
The Court disagreed, however, stating that the PTAB ignored evidence that the claimed features were also an important factor driving the commercial success of the broader product. Oren provided licensing data and market analysis evidence that this was the case. Since "it is not necessary that the patented invention be solely responsible for the commercial success, in order for this factor to be given weight appropriate to the evidence, along with other pertinent factors," the Court remanded the case to the PTAB for further consideration of the evidence.
The Kluwer Copyright Blog gave an update on EU copyright law developments for the second trimester of 2021, including insights into the cases and referrals coming up soon.
Welcome to the second trimester of 2021 round up of EU copyright law! Apologies to readers that this one comes a bit late. In this series, we update readers every three months on developments in EU copyright law. This includes Court of Justice (CJEU) and General Court judgments, Advocate Generals’ (AG) opinions, and important policy developments. You can read the first trimester round up here.
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The deadline to implement the CDSM Directive passed on 7 June 2021. Most Member States have missed the deadline, which has led the Commission to launch infringement proceedings against these Member States (see here). This is somewhat surprising, since the Commission itself was remarkably late in issuing its Guidance on art. 17 CDSM Directive (see below), which many Member States were waiting on before carrying out their implementation.
In retrospect, life was simple in 1996, the year that gave us the Database directive and its much-maligned sui generis right aimed at promoting a European database industry. Fast forward and see: The Database directive stands unchanged and there is still no clear evidence that the then-new intellectual property right is an effective instrument. At the same time, there is a flush of policy initiatives, laws and legislative proposals that either problematize or downplay the importance of intellectual property rights for data. Instead, the focus of policy makers is on how the sharing of data can be promoted in a society where data are generated all the time, everywhere, by everyone and everything. This is all part of the European Data Strategy. Its ambition is to “make more data available for use in the economy and society, while keeping those who generate the data in control.”
Will the Database directive survive the crowded field of data regulation?
One small sign that the Database directive is under pressure is in the current Public consultation on a set of European Digital Principles. The outcome will feed into the solemn declaration by Council, Parliament and Commission that is supposed to guide the further development of digital society. The consultation document restates the fundamental right to intellectual property as the fundamental principle of ‘protection of the intellectual creations of individuals in the online space’ but is otherwise silent on IP. Much bigger pressures come from the 2019 Open data and public sector information directive, the 2020 proposal for a Data governance regulation, and the still to be announced proposal for a Data Act. So how did we get to a place where the Database directive and specifically its sui generis right – once heralded by policy makers as the enabler of a glorious European database industry – has steadily been reduced to an instrument of minor relevance?
In 2005 artist Matt Furie created four cartoon characters for a cartoon called Boy’s Club: Andy, Brett, Landwolf, and Pepe. You’d be forgiven if you were not familiar with the first three, but if you’ve spent any time online in the last decade you’ll almost certainly have come across the fourth, Pepe the Frog.
It’s difficult to know exactly how this cartoon character became so popular, but it’s easy to find where it happened, 4chan. Around 2008 Pepe started being used in 4chan, and the character started showing everywhere in the chaotic image board, and as it was the birthplace of practically every meme at the time, it spread to the rest of the Internet, particularly with the always online crowd. It was a memer’s meme. By 2014 it had achieved widespread mainstream recognition.
But then something interesting happened… as the normie Internet started to percolate into 4chan due to the popularity of Pepe, 4chan responded by weaponising Pepe and turning it into an alt-right meme, and a religion, inextricably linked to Trump and the MAGA crowd. Pepe becoame the sign of every ugliness online, it allowed some people to claim playfulness, “look, we don’t mean all of this racism, we have a cartoon frog”. Pepe was listed as a hateful sign by the ADL.
