In the Linux Release Roundup series, we summarize the new application and distribution versions release in the last few days. This keeps you informed of the latest developments in the Linux world.
SUSE's new era kicks off this week, CentOS users get some relief, and how Docker managed to piss off their users.
Plus RISC-V gets a surprising benefactor, and the kernel feature we never thought would get merged that was just approved by Linus.
Since April 2020, we are offering our training courses online, both in public sessions available to individual registration and in dedicated sessions for specific customers.
So far, our public sessions have always been organized from 2 PM to 6 PM Paris time, which was a good fit for our customers in Europe and in the US East Coast, but not so much for our customers in the US West Coast, in the Middle East and Asia.
Tachyum has successfully executed the Linux boot process on the field-programmable gate array (FPGA) prototype of its Prodigy Universal Processor.
The platform-drivers-x86 area of the kernel continues to be quite active with particularly offering better support for modern Intel/AMD laptops. With Linux 5.15 there is another big batch of improvements that landed at the end of last week.
A microservice team asked me for help with a mysterious issue. They claimed that the ZFS file system was consuming 30% of CPU capacity. I summarized this case study at [Kernel Recipes] in 2017 and have shared the full story here. ## 1. Problem Statement The microservice was for metrics ingestion and had recently updated their base OS image (BaseAMI). After doing so, they claimed that ZFS was now eating over 30% of CPU capacity. My first thought was that they were somehow mistaken: I worked on ZFS internals at Sun Microsystems, and unless it is badly misconfigured there's no way it can consume that much CPU. I have been surprised many times by unexpected performance issues, so I thought I should check their instances anyway. At the very least, I could show that I took it seriously enough to check it myself. I should also be able to identify the real CPU consumer. ## 2. Monitoring I started with the cloud-wide monitoring tool, [Atlas], to check high-level CPU metrics. These included a breakdown of CPU time into percentages for "usr" (user: applications) and "sys" (system: the kernel). I was surprised to find a whopping 38% of CPU time was in sys, which is highly unusual for cloud workloads at my employer. This supported the claim that ZFS was eating CPU, but how? Surely this is some other kernel activity, and not ZFS. ## 3. Next Steps I'd usually SSH to instances for deeper analysis, where I could use mpstat(1) to confirm the usr/sys breakdown and perf(1) to begin profiling on-CPU kernel code paths. But since Netflix has tools (previously [Vector], now FlameCommander) that allow us to easily fetch flame graphs from our cloud deployment UI, I thought I'd jump to the chase. Just for illustration, this shows the Vector UI and a typical cloud flame graph.
Josh and Kurt talk about GitHub Copilot. What can we learn from a report claiming 40% of code generated by Copilot has security vulnerabilities? Is this the future or just some sort of strange new thing that will be gone as fast as it came?
Linus Torvalds will pull Paragon Software's NTFS driver into the 5.15 kernel source – but he complained about the use of a GitHub merge in the submission, saying that GitHub "creates absolutely useless garbage merges."
Early last month Torvalds gave Paragon Software a nudge that it really should submit a pull request – an actual submission of code to be merged into the kernel source – in order for its read-write NTFS driver to be included in the forthcoming 5.15 release, for which the merge window is currently open. NTFS is the native Windows file system and Paragon's implementation will improve interoperability, versus the existing driver which has limited write support.
On Friday Paragon duly submitted its pull request, saying: "Current version works with normal/compressed/sparse files and supports acl, NTFS journal replaying."
HPLIP, Hewlett-Packard’s Linux imaging and printing software, released version 3.21.8 with new printers support.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install SQLite on Debian 11. For those of you who didn’t know, SQLite is a C-language library that implements a small, fast, self-contained, high-reliability, full-featured, SQL database engine. It’s a popular solution for applications that need to use on-disk files formatted as lightweight databases to run efficiently.
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 SQLite on a Debian 11 (Bullseye).
This simple tutorial shows how to install Virtualbox Guest Additions in Ubuntu based systems, e.g., Linux Mint, Zorin OS and Elementary OS, with fix or workaround for common issues.
Guest Additions is a set of device drivers and system applications to install in Guest OS. It’s useful when you try to share folder and/or clipboard between guest and host, enable USB support etc. Installing the software suite is easy via a menu option. However, it might not function in some cases.
Even if we have native Linux applications available for several tools, many end up using web applications.
Maybe in the form of an electron app or directly through a web browser, native experiences are becoming an old-school thing.
Of course, running web applications, no matter the platform, needs more system resources. And, considering every service is going for a web-based approach instead of a native experience, we need solutions to manage the web apps efficiently.
In this video, I am going to show an overview of Linux Lite 5.6 and some of the applications pre-installed.
ONLYOFFICE Docs is an open-source office suite distributed under GNU AGPL v3.0. It comprises web-based viewers and collaborative editors for text documents, spreadsheets, and presentations highly compatible with OOXML formats.
ONLYOFFICE Docs can be integrated with various cloud services such as Nextcloud, ownCloud, Seafile, Alfresco, Plone, etc., as well as embedded into your own solution. The editors can also be used as a part of the complete productivity solution ONLYOFFICE Workspace.
If you want to ditch MS Office, but not ready to do it abruptly, you can try ONLYOFFICE Docs integrated in the SharePoint content management system. This combo allows you to edit and collaborate on docx, xlsx, and pptx files directly within the CMS.
In this tutorial, we’ll learn how to connect these two applications using WOPI, a Web Application Open Platform Interface protocol intended to standardize the integration process.
Radicale is a free and open-source CalDAV (Calendars, to-do lists) and CardDav (contacts) server. It aims to be a small and lightweight (CalDAV and CardDav) server application, yet powerful and works out-of-the-box. Radicale allows you to shares calendars and contact lists through CalDAV, CardDAV, and HTTPS. And most importantly, it can be secure through TLS connection and authentication. Also, it works with many CalDAV and CardDAV clients such as gnome-calendar, evolution, Mozilla thunderbird, DAVx (for android), etc.
Radicale comes with a simple configuration, and it's easy to configure and install. Radicale is written in Python, it runs on operating systems like Linux, BSD, macOS, and Windows.
In this tutorial, you will learn how to install and configure Radicale on Ubuntu 20.04.
Reveal.js is a free and open-source HTML presentation framework that enables users to create free, fully-featured, and attractive presentations using a web browser. Users can use web technologies in the presentations using the reveal.js framework. This tool helps to add more CSS styles, add an external web page, include <iframe>and custom user behavior using different JavaScript APIs.
We will see in this article how to install the Reveal.js HTML presentation framework on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS system.
Ubuntu and its derivatives often affected by the initramfs issue. As far as I know, it occurs usually on the disks that are formatted with ext4 filesystem. I haven't had this problem in BTRFS though. Until today, I thought only the Ubuntu-based systems are affected by this issue. I was wrong! Today, I encountered with the initramfs issue in my Fedora 34 desktop system. I already knew how to fix Initramfs error on Ubuntu Linux. In this guide, I will show you how to solve initramfs error in Fedora.
VirtualBox is a free and opensource virtualization tool which allows us to run multiple operating systems at the same time. As the name suggests, VirtualBox creates a virtualized environment for installing and running operating systems. It is available for Windows, Linux, macOS and Solaris. VirtualBox is generally used at desktop level where geeks create test environment in the guest virtual machines.
Most modern Linux Desktop systems come with an Nvidia driver pre-installed in the Nouveau open-source graphics device driver for Nvidia video cards. For the most part, this is acceptable; however, if you are using your Linux system for graphical design or gaming, you may get better drivers.
Historically, the Nouveau proprietary drivers are slower than Nvidia’s proprietary drivers, along with lacking the newest features, software technology, and support for the latest graphics card hardware. In most situations, upgrading your Nvidia Drivers using the following guide is more beneficial than not doing it. In some cases, you may see some substantial improvements overall.
In the following guide, you will know how to install Nvidia drivers on your AlmaLinux 8 desktop.
Want to install Linux but think it might be a disaster? Installing Linux on a PC or laptop is easier than you think - here's what you need to know.
In easy terms, a service is a program or application in Linux that runs or expects to run in the background. That is, it is running without the need for
It’s amusing how the simplest of the things could be complicated when you are new to something.
The other day, I found my friend could not figure out how to exit the top command. Instead of stopping the command, he closed the entire terminal application.
That’s not only unnecessary, it is a not good thing to do.
Developing applications for regulated and high security environments can be challenging. There is a plethora of software following diverse development methods and standards, but not always targeting a particular data protection standard. How can a large organization be assured that the cryptographic applications and libraries used implement cryptography correctly and follow best practices? FIPS 140 tackles the cryptography validation problem from the perspective of the U.S. regulator. To learn more about FIPS check the first article on this topic. In essence the FIPS 140 standard ensures that cryptography is implemented using well known secure designs, follows certain best practices, does not involve obscure algorithms, and that there is a due process in attestation.
Linux kernel 5.14 is out and is quite popular for people to test out with many new features, support, and security. The Linux 5.14 kernel release has gone through seven release candidates over the last two months and benefits from the contributions of 1,650 different developers. Those that contribute to Linux kernel development include individual contributors and large vendors like Intel, AMD, IBM, Oracle, and Samsung.
August 2021 was another record-breaking month for Enable Sysadmin. We published 22 articles and had over 670,000 read articles from over 459,000 readers. Today, we are looking back at our top 10 articles to give readers a chance to catch up on any of the great content they might have missed. In this list, you will see various topics covered, and we are confident that some, if not all, will be of interest to you.
This guide lists out all the top most used basic Linux commands every day on your Linux system. You can use the following commands on any Linux distributions like Ubuntu, Debian, CentOS, Fedora, RedHat, ArcLinux.
The following commands are executed in Command Line which is referred as Linux-shell. Let’s get to the common commands used everyday.
ImageMagick is a handy multipurpose command-line tool for all your image needs. ImageMagick supports a variety of image types, including JPG photos and PNG graphics.
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I often use ImageMagick on my webserver to resize images. For example, let's say I want to include a photo of my cats on my personal website. The photo from my phone is very large, about 4000x3000 pixels, at 3.3MB. That's much too large for a web page. I use the ImageMagick convert tool to change the size of my photo so that I can include it on my web page. ImageMagick is a full suite of tools, one of the most common is the convert command.
Imagine cramming an RTX 3080, a Ryzen 9 5900HX, and 16 GB DDR4 RAM into a slim chassis that’s barely thicker than an inch and weighing in at less than five pounds. That’s what the Tuxedo Stellaris laptop by Tuxedo Computers is (the name is not to be confused with the game).
You may recall earlier this year I had done a review of the Polaris laptop by the same company. Well, after getting in touch with them again, they offered me the Stellaris. I was blown away by the specs looking at the web page for it. There was no way I was going to reject this!
Recently it was announced by developer Snoozy Kazoo that their (rather great) game Turnip Boy Commits Tax Evasion was ending Linux support but they've now restored it.
Initially their announcement on August 19 mentioned that "it has been a struggle to reliably build and test the Linux version". However, after numerous replies from Linux fans the developer ended up adding a Beta version for testing on August 30 and later on September 2 they restored the support in full.
I have been using the awesome window manager for 10 years. It is a tiling window manager, configurable and extendable with the Lua language. Using a general-purpose programming language to configure every aspect is a double-edged sword. Due to laziness and the apparent difficulty of adapting my configuration—about 3000 lines—to newer releases, I was stuck with the 3.4 version, whose last release is from 2013.
It was time for a rewrite. Instead, I have switched to the i3 window manager, lured by the possibility to migrate to Wayland and Sway later with minimal pain. Using an embedded interpreter for configuration is not as important to me as it was in the past: it brings both complexity and brittleness.
My full name is Mohammad-Ali Bahabadi, but I sign with my shortened version of my name, Ali Bahabadi. I was born in 1983 in Iran. I got a master’s degree in art conservation but I have been working as graphic designer for several years.
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I am new to digital painting, but I think that digital painting has made it easier for me to paint, and in a short time it has made me a better artist. Although this change might be small, I can easily feel it myself. Almost every day I paint a new painting, which I believe it is not so easy be achieved in the traditional way. I need to thank everyone who contributed to the development of Krita. I have had the possibility of digital painting for many years. I had both a good graphic tablet and the most expensive graphic software available to me. But I think there was something in Krita that encouraged me to paint every day. Krita has a friendly spirit that accompanies me in painting.
EasyOS, and all the pups, login as root, but with capability of running apps as user "spot". I am planning to create a Chromium or Chrome browser PET or SFS, and intend to run the browser with user spot.
Before doing that however, spot has to be relocated to a more rational path. spot's home has been /root/spot, same as the early pups, however, have now relocated to /clients/spot, see snapshot:
New version of Lakka has been released!
We are happy to announce new and updated version of Lakka.
Lakka 3.4 Available to Download, Lakka is a lightweight Linux distribution that transforms a small computer into a full blown game console. The project’s latest release is Lakka 3.4 and it updates RetroArch support, the Mesa package, DOS support, and popular console support.
OpenWrt 21.02 has just been released with higher security with WPA3, HTTPS & TLS enabled by default, as well as initial support for the Distributed Switch Architecture (DSA), the Linux standard for configurable Ethernet switches.
OpenWrt is the most popular open-source Linux distribution for routers and entry-level Linux-capable embedded systems, and the latest release includes over 5800 commits since the release of OpenWrt 19.07 in January 2020.
WPA3 was already supported in OpenWrt 19.07, but not enabled by default, OpenWrt 20.02 changes that, together with TLS thanks to trusted CA certificates from Mozilla. That means LuCi interface, wget, opkg package manager can all support HTTPS out-of-the-box. Note that HTTPS redirection can be disabled for LuCI in the configuration files. Another security change is that SELinux is now supported by OpenWrt, but not enabled by default.
OpenWrt 21.02’s DSA implementation replaces the current swconfig system, but not all targets have been ported, so some are still using swconfig. Since the two solutions are much different, a system upgrade will not be able to convert an existing swconfig configuration to DSA configuration.
The new release also updates the syntax of configuration files including board.json. OpenWrt 21.02 will still support the old convention and the LuCI interface can migrate your config automatically to the new syntax.
Various packages have been updated with OpenWrt relying on Linux 5.4.143, busybox 1.33.1, gcc 8.4.0, and the operating system switched from mbedTLS to wolfSSL as the default SSL library. Both mbedTLS and OpenSSL can still be installed manually. New hardware targets have been added from realtek, Broadcom (bcm4908), and Rockchip RL33xx which should be good news for Rockchip RK3328 and RK3399 boards such NanoPi R2S, Rock Pi 4, Pine64 RockPro64, or which are already supported, but hopefully others like Orange Pi R1 Plus will be added to the list.
GIMP is an acronym for GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is a freely distributed program for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring.
The openSUSE Project participated in this year’s Google Summer of Code along with several mentoring organizations.
Six of the seven accepted projects were successfully completed and mentors of the participating projects helped students improve their programming skills and knowledge of open source over the 10-week program.
Let’s review the contributions!
The first contribution we will cover involves the Uyuni Project. The purpose of the project was converting the JSP code of virtual systems pages to ReactJS. Improving the User Interface of freshly created virtual systems page resulted in a Pull Request 4152 that is listed as work in progress and is nearing completion.
Earlier this year, we shared the 7 business leadership conferences to explore in 2021. If you’re looking to work in a few learning opportunities before the year ends, we’ve rounded up some fall conferences worth exploring.
Conference organizers are hoping to attract CIOs and IT leaders by putting together a mix of in-person events, virtual sessions, and hybrid-models in an effort to consider the comfort level of all possible attendees. There’s a wealth of knowledge to be gained, not to mention the potential networking opportunities.
Some of the conferences we’ve highlighted offer an in-person option for attendees who are ready to get back to (masked) face-to-face connection. Other events will take a hybrid-approach with a certain number of participants joining in person and the rest engaging digitally. Virtual events have presented a more affordable option for attendees who may not have been able to engage otherwise. Additionally, when you consider the year-plus of experience organizers have had hosting virtual conferences, digital events will offer plenty of perspectives, thoughtful sessions, and inspiration that CIOs can take home and implement into their own organizations.
Red Hat recently conducted a Customer Empathy Workshop series that included two virtual workshops focused on continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) tooling within Red Hat OpenShift. The Red Hat User Experience Design team partnered with Product Management and Engineering to engage 22 OpenShift customers from seven different companies.
During each workshop, we used digital whiteboards and video conferencing to virtually engage customers in hands-on activities. We used the first three steps of the classic design thinking—empathize, define, and ideate—to identify and understand problems as well as suggest solutions. Let’s take a look at what we learned.
I like history, and I like computers, so I enjoy hearing stories about computing before computers were an everyday household appliance, much less a personal accessory. One tale I hear often is about how the computers of long ago (in computer years, anyway) were pleasantly basic. They were so basic, in fact, that it was relatively trivial for a curious user to figure out how to program one. Looking at modern computers, with object-oriented programming languages, complex GUI frameworks, network APIs, containers, and more, there's genuine concern that the tools of the computing trade have become essentially inaccessible to anyone without specialized training.
From the day the Raspberry Pi was released in 2012, it has always been intended as an educational platform. Several third-party vendors support the Pi with add-ons and training kits to help learners of all ages explore programming, physical computing, and open source. However, until recently, it's largely been up to the user to figure out how all the pieces on the market fit together. And then I got a CrowPi.
While RISC-V garners most of the interest these days when it comes to open-source processor ISAs, OpenRISC continues pushing forward with its Linux kernel support.
OpenRISC doesn't have any readily available commercial implementations available but so far is still left running OpenRISC on FPGAs. OpenRISC developers have been working on upstreaming more of their OpenRISC LiteX drivers for such "build your hardware" scenarios. More details on the LiteX project for those interested via GitHub.
Adobe Lightroom is a non-destructive photo editing software. It's part of the Adobe ecosystem and comes with great photo editing features. However, it doesn't come cheap.
Its price tag is a bit off-putting if you're looking for affordable editing software, but don't worry. There are several free, open source alternatives that you can use to edit your images.
Another release of the tidyCpp package arrived on CRAN earlier today. The packages offers a clean C++ layer on top of the C API for R which aims to make its use a little easier and more consistent.
The vignette has been extended once more with a new example, and added a table of contents. The package now supports a (truly minimal) C++ class for a numeric vector which is the most likely use case.
The NEWS entry follows and includes the 0.0.3 release earlier in the year which did not get the usual attention of post-release blog post.
The Rakudo Core Developer team (more specifically Jonathan Worthington, Stefan Seifert, Daniel Green, Jan-Olof Hendig, Nicholas Clark and Oleksandr Kyriukhin) have reached a milestone on the new-disp branch: all 117K+ spectests are now passing! Focus for the coming week is now on fixing module breakage in the ecosystem (some of which is caused by them being naughty referring to internal features that have been refactored), and improving the performance of Rakudo. Great to see such advances!
After the stabilization of the const generics MVP in version 1.51, the const generics project group has continued to work on const generics. Large parts of this work were gated behind the feature gates const_generics and const_evaluatable_checked. As time went on, the const_generics feature became fairly useless on its own while the name of const_evaluatable_checked didn't really capture what this feature was intended to do.
To improve this, we have recently removed the features const_generics, lazy_normalization_consts, and const_evaluatable_checked. They have been replaced by feature(adt_const_params) and feature(generic_const_exprs).
When a VGA monitor does not start at all, a common reason is that one or two capacitors are damaged. All you need to do to repair it is to replace them, and you’re good to go. It’s quite easier than you think, and I’ll show you how.
I was tasked with repairing a VGA monitor, namely an LG Flatron W1934S, that would not turn on anymore. All I could see what the blue power LED blinking regularly, about every two seconds. Since so far, I had a 100% success rate in failing to repair TVs, I was not confident, and I thought maybe the monitor is some special state making it not turn on, as it happened to me with another monitor a few years ago.
There are some situations when running an antivirus on Linux makes sense, but the average Linux desktop isn’t one of them.
For Windows users, installing an antivirus software on their system has become one of the first steps over the years. But for a Linux system, the choice is not as clear. A big question usually asked by those who just have switched to Linux is: “Why Linux doesn’t need antivirus?”.
In this article, we will answer your questions and give you a few tips depending on your system usage.
Security updates have been issued by Debian (btrbk, pywps, and squashfs-tools), Fedora (libguestfs, libss7, ntfs-3g, ntfs-3g-system-compression, partclone, testdisk, wimlib, and xen), Mageia (exiv2, golang, libspf2, and ruby-addressable), openSUSE (apache2, dovecot23, gstreamer-plugins-good, java-11-openjdk, libesmtp, mariadb, nodejs10, opera, python39, sssd, and xerces-c), and SUSE (apache2, java-11-openjdk, libesmtp, mariadb, nodejs10, python39, sssd, xen, and xerces-c).
Yet another article on the privacy risks of static MAC addresses and always-on Bluetooth connections. This one is about wireless headphones.
The Taliban takeover in Kabul, the frantic evacuation efforts of foreign nationals and vulnerable Afghans, and the fear among those left behind of being targeted by the new regime are shining a spotlight on the double-edged nature of government data collection as well as digital communication tools in times of crisis.
Last Thursday, an american judge ruled that Apple will have to continue fighting a lawsuit brought by users in federal court in California. The case is one of several that have been brought against Apple, Google and Amazon that involve allegations of violation of privacy by voice assistants.
Last week I was part of a meeting with the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority, the regulator, to talk about Apple devices and the browser choice (or lack of it) on them. They’re doing a big study into Apple’s conduct in relation to the distribution of apps on iOS and iPadOS devices in the UK, in particular, the terms and conditions governing app developers’ access to Apple’s App Store, and part of that involves looking at browsers on iOS, and part of that involves talking to people who work on the web. So myself and Bruce Lawson and another UK developer of iOS and web apps put together some thoughts and had a useful long meeting with the CMA on the topic.
They asked that we keep confidential the exact details of what was discussed and asked, which I think is reasonable, but I did put together a slide deck to summarise my thoughts which I presented to them, and you can certainly see that. It’s at kryogenix.org/code/cma-apple and shows everything that I presented to the CMA along with my detailed notes on what it all means.
Last month, the Supreme People's Court (SPC) of the People's Republic of China affirmed on a definitive basis a decision by the Shenzhen Intermediate People's Court that OPPO is in its right to seek a global FRAND determination against Sharp from a Chinese court. Sharp had brought a jurisdictional appeal of the decision below. Last week, Chinese media reported on the ruling.
According to Counterpoint Research, OPPO shipped well 33.6 million smartphones during the last quarter, making it number four in the global market in its own right--though if you throw in the 32.5 million units sold by vivo and the volumes of other subsidiaries of the BBK Electronics group (such as OnePlus), we're actually talking about the world's largest smartphone maker (well ahead of Samsung and Apple). OPPO already has significant traction in various markets outside China, and increasingly has to fend off patent royalty demands and infringement assertions. Landmark rulings are an effective way to earn the respect of actual or potential adversaries.
At a time when the European Commission is challenging the Chinese stance on global standard-essential patent (SEP) dispute resolution by means of a set of questions raised at the WTO level, this ruling by China's top court is particularly important. It took me a few days to obtain an unofficial English translation. While I don't claim to know Chinese law, the ruling is, thankfully, self-explanatory.
The Tenth Circuit’s analysis in Hetronic v Hetronic Germany expands a circuit split, which could lead SCOTUS to accept cert if the defendants appeal
The Turkish Patent and Trademark Office has upheld Red Bull's opposition against an application for a composite mark intended for energy drinks.
