We had a peaceful week in the world of Linux Releases with the releases of antiX 21 Beta 2 and ArcoLinux 21.09.11.
I hope that you will have a wonderful week and a great Autumn.
Also, as we are reaching the 150th newsletter soon, do you have a special request to celebrate it?
Thousands of users...? Isn't it a little too low? Typical Swift clusters in Telcos have tens of millions of users, of which tens or hundreds of thousands are active simultaneously.
A while back I talked about Linux on the M1 Mac and it's been making a lot of progress since then, it has now reached a point where it doesn't work well but it's getting very close to that point.
For the hw-enablement for Bay- and Cherry-Trail devices which I do as a side project, sometimes it is useful to play with the Android which comes pre-installed on some of these devices.
Sometimes the Android-X86 boot-loader (kerneflinger) is locked and the standard "Developer-Options" -> "Enable OEM Unlock" -> "Run 'fastboot oem unlock'" sequence does not work (e.g. I got the unlock yes/no dialog, and could move between yes and no, but I could not actually confirm the choice).
Following portions of the merge request landing, the rest of the RadeonSI CPU-overhead-lowering work was just merged to Mesa 21.3.
Marek Olšák and the open-source AMD Radeon OpenGL driver developers have been working on this big set of 42 patches over the past number of weeks. The focus is ultimately on lowering the CPU overhead of the driver.
File management is a complicated task in and of itself. Add to that large volume of duplicate files that typically hog up the storage space, and the process becomes increasingly difficult.
While the standard way to deal with duplicate files is to locate and delete them manually. However, using a dedicated duplicate file finder program instead can significantly accelerate the process.
So if you're planning to get rid of duplicate files and clean up your computer, here’s a list of some of the best tools for finding and removing duplicate files in Linux.
In this video, we are looking at how to install Google Chrome on Linux Lite 5.4. Enjoy!
Today we are looking at how to install the Y8 Browser on a Chromebook. Please follow the video/audio guide as a tutorial where we explain the process step by step and use the commands below.
This tutorial will deal with Megatools Linux install and Basic Introduction. MEGA is one of the most famous cloud storage and file hosting services available. The service offered by the company are normally accessible via web interface or dedicated applications also on smartphone operating systems such as Android or iOS. In this article we see how to access the service from the command line via a free and open source set of tools written in Python: Megatools.
The wipefs Linux command utility can be used to erase various types of signatures from a device (partition tables, filesystem signatures, etc…). It is available in the repository of all the most used Linux distributions, and it is usually installed by default as part of of the util-linux package, which contains also other essentials utilities aimed at system maintenance, so we should never have to install it explicitly. In this tutorial we will see how to use wipefs to gather information about the existing signatures and how to erase them.
In this tutorial you will learn how to increase disk size on VirtualBox. One of the great things about installing an operating system into a virtual machine is that we can easily change the machine’s CPU utilization limit, its memory usage, and the amount of hard drive space it has. With VirtualBox, all of these hardware specifications can even be changed long after the virtual machine is created.
If you have already installed Linux or some other operating system like Windows or BSD into a VirtualBox virtual machine, and then realized that you are running out of hard drive space, don’t despair. VirtualBox gives us a simple way to increase the amount of hard drive space available to a virtual machine.
There are tons of screen recorders available for Linux. But when it comes to supporting Wayland, almost all of them do not work.
This is problematic because many new distribution releases are switching to Wayland display manager by default once again. And if something as basic as a screen recorder does not work, it leaves a bad experience.
GNOME’s built-in screen recorder works but it is hidden, has no GUI and no way to configure and control the recordings. There is another tool called Kooha but it keeps on displaying a timer on the screen.
Switching between Xorg and Wayland just for screen recording is not very convenient.
Amidst all this, I was happy to learn that Wayland support landed in OBS Studio with version 27 release thanks to Pipewire. But even there, it’s not straightforward and hence I am going to show you the steps for screen recording on Wayland using OBS Studio.
Parallel Clustering allows for multiple systems to run programs together as if they were one system. A Parallel Cluster is also called a Beowulf Cluster.
Fedora Linux is one of the most well-known versions of the Linux operating system. This community-run Linux distribution, sponsored by Red Hat, prides itself on developing and introducing the software that eventually makes its way to other Linux distros.
Fedora Silverblue packages and uses that software in a way different from the traditional Linux desktop model, one that may become the way forward for Fedora and, possibly, other Linux distros. You can already use it today, and here’s why you might want to.
If you’re new to the world of Linux, you may find yourself wondering how to free up disk space. It’s not always as simple as just uninstalling some programs. This is particularly true if you have many files taking up space scattered across your whole filesystem. While there are many different ways to free up disk space in Linux, read on to learn about one of the quickest: using du and some basic terminal commands.
Need a good writing tool for your Linux PC? Check out Manuskript. It has some seriously awesome features that any writer will love, such as an outlining tool, distraction-free mode, a built-in assistant tool, and many others.
In this guide, we’ll go over how to install Manuskript on Linux. We’ll also go over how to use it to organize your writing projects. Ensure you are using Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, Arch Linux, or OpenSUSE to get started.
The Gnome edition of Manjaro Linux delivers Gnome 40 without major changes – the Manjaro team wants to stay as close as possible to the upstream versions. However, the Gnome developers have revised the user interface of the Gnome Shell in version 40, which some users do not like. Manjaro Linux 21.1 offers its own legacy layout for them, which simulates the operating concept of Gnome 3.38. In addition, the Manjaro team has ensured that all layouts contained in their own layout switcher also work under Gnome 40. There you can change the arrangement of the control elements such as the main menu and taskbar, for example in the classic way as in Windows or based on Ubuntu Unity.
Some time ago I looked briefly at an Envertech data logger for small scale photovoltaic setups. Turned out that PV inverter are kinda unreliable, and you really have to monitor them to notice downtimes and defects. Since my pal shot for a quick win I've cobbled together another Python script to query the portal at www.envertecportal.com, and report back if the generated power is down to 0. The script is currently run on a vserver via cron and reports back via the system MTA. So yeah, you need to have something like that already at hand.
We’re in the process of upgrading to Debian 11 (bullseye). If you come across any issues, feel free to raise them on the #debian-social IRC channel on oftc (also accessible via Matrix) and we’ll look into it as soon as we have a chance.
Matrix synapse was updated to 1.40.0, during the upgrade the server was upgraded to Bullseye.
Running an app as a non-root user also means that it can't write just anywhere in the filesystem, can be constrained to only write in its own home folder. And if required, can be prevented from reading critical files.
Of course Easy already has "crippled root" in containers, so running, say, SeaMonkey, on the main desktop as a non-root user would have to be seen as an alternative security strategy. SeaMonkey will run a little bit faster, and won't have the issues that some people have reported with running SM in a container, such as problem with network connectivity.
If each app is run as its own user, this means that EasyOS can implement a permissions management GUI like in Android. Like, do you want this app to be able to access the camera, network, audio, folders outside the "home" folder? ...etc.
So, have started to setup the infrastructure to support this. The idea is that top-level /clients folder will have these non-root users, though I would like to refer to them as "clients".
Aaeon’s rugged, $851 “VPC-5620S” system offers an 8th Gen Core CPU plus up to 64GB DDR4, 5x Gbe (4x with PoE), 4x USB, HDMI and DP, SATA, M.2 with NVMe, multiple mini-PCIe, and an optional in-vehicle configuration.
Ibase’s rugged “AGS103T” embedded system runs on Intel’s Elkhart Lake and offers up to 16GB DDR4, 3x GbE, 4x USB, 4x COM, 3x mini-PCIe, and M.2 B-key plus an optional 2.5-inch SATA bay.
The fanless, compact AGS103T is built around Intel’s 10nm-fabricated, MCU-equipped Elkhart Lake platform. The rugged, 218 x 110 x 57mm system is designed for embedded applications in factory automation, IoT gateway, edge computing, and automatic control systems.
Raspberry Pi created a revolution when it launched the $25 mini computer ten years ago. Over the time, several variants of Raspberry Pi have been launched. Some upgrade a previous model and some are crafted for specific purposes.
Of all the Raspberry models, Pi Zero and Pi Zero W are the cheapest ones aimed for small scale and IoT projects. Both devices are almost similar to each other but with a subtle and important difference.
So, what is the difference between Raspberry Pi Zero and Zero W? The W in Zero W stands for Wireless and it depicts its wireless capability over the Pi Zero model. That’s the single biggest difference between the two similar models.
As its name implies, LILYGO T-Display RP2040 is a Raspberry Pi RP2040 based development board that comes with a display, and more exactly a 1.14-inch color display with 240Ãâ135 resolution and based on ST7789V SPI display driver.
The T-Display RP2040 board joins other Rasberry Pi RP2040 boards with integrated displays like Arducam Pico4ML, but does so at a much lower price with LILYGO selling the board for just $9.98 on Aliexpress.
Arduino Portenta H7 Lite is a cost-down version of Portenta H7 STM32H7 that shaves off a little over $30 of the Arduino Pro board by doing without a wireless module nor USB-C video output and opting for a lower cost Microchip ATECC608 secure element.
Arduino says the new board provides a cost-optimized solution for companies developing high-end industrial machinery, laboratory equipment, computer vision, PLCs, robotics controllers, and mission-critical devices.
ERP5 is one of the most and complete web-based ERP platform for small modern companies, designed to be flexible to fit different business areas and to be used through the web. It aims to match the requirement of globalization and increase distributed nature.
This is the 43rd edition of the Kafka Monthly Digest. In this edition, I’ll cover what happened in the Apache Kafka community in August 2021.
If you made it this far, you now have a good understanding of what Candid is, what it is for and how it is used. For this final post, I’ll put the spotlight on specific aspects of Candid that are maybe surprising, or odd, or quirky. This section will be quite opinionated, and could maybe be called “what I’d do differently if I’d re-do the whole thing”.
Note that these quirks are not serious problems, and they don’t invalidate the overall design. I am writing this up not to discourage the use of Candid, but merely help interested parties to understand it better.
Intel has released a new version of their loader for oneAPI Level Zero for loading the Level Zero software driver components.
Like the title says, I wanted to show the Unicode code points (formatted \uxxxx) for a set of UTF-8 characters. There are programs that do just that in a number of programming languages, but I wanted to do the job with garden-variety shell tools.
The solution I've chosen is based on a 2019 SuperUser suggestion from Brazilian developer Danilo G. Veraszto. The trick is to first convert the character to "UNICODEBIG" (big-endian Unicode) encoding with iconv. I pass the output to xxd, set to put a space between every two bytes (-g 2)...
JDK 17, the reference implementation of Java 17, is now Generally Available. We shipped build 35 as the first Release Candidate of JDK 17 on 6 August, and no P1 bugs have been reported since then. Build 35 is therefore now the GA build, ready for production use.
Java's Vector API is quite exciting and building off the initial code in Java 16. The Java Vector API aims to make it easy to allow run-time handling and optimal vector instruction generation across CPU architectures for SSE, AVX, Arm NEON, and other instruction set extensions.
Java 17 is quite notable in that it will be a Long-Term Support (LTS) release, including from Oracle.
Many of our foods have adapted the label of “superfoods,” but why settle for super when you can try foods that are heaven-sent? Theobroma cacao, the scientific name for the cocoa plant, literally translates to “food of the gods.” Both delicious and divine, cacao is not the only fruit with a fascinating indigenous history.
From breadfruit to ‘booch, 2021 has delivered a dazzling array of international superfoods to your grocery store aisles. But with dozens of choices, it can be hard to sort through the purpose and potential applications of each superfood—and to know which truly boosts your health to the max.
Superfoods also come with deep histories, which are often appropriated by mainstream food marketing. Rather than simplifying or misrepresenting the cultures these incredible foods spring from, talking to people at the source can help you foster a deeper understanding of a food’s culture.
Lenovo has been caught doing some shady things before, from installing the Superfish malware, to the infamous BIOS that took a Windows “security feature” and used it to keep reinstalling crapware no matter how many times the user deleted it, to blocking the installation of GNU/Linux operating systems in 2016, forcing me to take my case to the Attorney General of Illinois. Lisa Madigan, at the time.
To my surprise, her office opened an antitrust investigation and as soon as Lenovo and Microsoft heard the gears turning, they threw the transmission into full reverse and backtracked with a BIOS repair. But Microsoft and Lenovo are like the Shadows and their Dark Servants in Babylon 5. Every time they were defeated, they’d scatter their remaining forces, sleep for a while, and come up with a new strategy to slowly lick their wounds and then try to start problems all over again.
For Lenovo’s part, even though they’ve been smacked down by court proceedings and bad publicity, they have no idea when to stop trying to chase down a user for a quick buck after they’ve already bought an expensive computer. And Microsoft is obviously happy with what any decent company would consider slander, because Lenovo is selling “snake oil” subscriptions that essentially cost $30 a year to empty your recycle bin.
“These rules will help an organization have a better grip on their open source compliance efforts and will help them minimize the number of compliance-related errors that occur during the software development process,” he says.
The Academy Software Foundation (ASWF), a project hosted by The Linux Foundation, provides a neutral forum for open source software developers in the motion picture and broader media industries to share resources and collaborate on image creation, visual effects, animation, and sound technologies.
Simply put: Unsuspecting users can be tricked users into connecting to WiFi spots setup by hackers. This would not only exposed users to data theft but access their personal information on their device – That’s why the vulnerability has been dubbed SSID stripping.
Adobe has released security updates to address vulnerabilities in multiple Adobe products. An attacker could exploit some of these vulnerabilities to take control of an affected system.
There was an interesting discussion on IRC today. In brief, it was about exposing one’s database structures over API and security implications of this approach. I’d recommend reading the whole thing because Altreus delivers a good (and somewhat emotional) point on why such practice is most definitely bad design decision. Despite having minor objections, I generally agree to him.
But I’m not wearing out my keyboard on this post just to share that discussion. There was something in it what made me feel as if I miss something. And it came to me a bit later, when I was done with my payjob and got a bit more spare resources for the brain to utilize.
First of all, a bell rang when a hash was mentioned as the mediator between a database and API return value. I’m somewhat wary about using hashes as return values primarily for a reason of performance price and concurrency unsafety.
Kape buys ExpressVPN. Very likely to ruin it like they did Private Internet Access.
This won’t be a long post except to warn people not to buy any new subscriptions to ExpressVPN, and with what’s coming, if you have one, you’ll likely just want to let it expire and take it off of auto-renew.
In fact, they may just get so bad, so fast, that you’ll abandon time you paid them for and give up trying to use it, like what happened with me and PIA about 9 months after Kape took them over, shut down most of the servers, and signed cheaper deals with less bandwidth and lower priority with their hosting providers.
ExpressVPN, one of the industry’s leading Virtual Private Networks, has been sold to Kape Technologies for a whopping $936 million deal announced on Tuesday.
We are delighted to share we will be joining Kape, a London Stock Exchange-listed company, to form the global leader in digital privacy.
Kape Technologies Plc agreed to buy ExpressVPN in a $936 million deal that will more than double the cybersecurity company’s customer base and expand its tools for private web surfing.
Kape will pay $354 million in cash when the deal closes and the equivalent of $237 million in shares, which can be sold after a 24-month lockup, the company said in a statement on Monday. Another $345 million in cash will be paid in two installments, 12 months and 24 months after the close. The deal still needs approval from regulators.
The British Virgin Islands-based virtual-private-network operator will more than double Kape’s customer base to over 6 million users. ExpressVPN lets users pay to access the internet via servers that hide their computers’ location and activity and offer more privacy.
Only a couple of weeks after the South Korean government passed a bill that will force Google (and Apple) to allow app developers to receive payments via third-party systems, the country's regulator has dealt another huge blow to the Mountain View company. The Korea Fair Trade Commission (KFTC) has announced that it's fining Google's parent company Alphabet the modest sum of $177 million for abusing its dominance in the smartphone OS market.
Artificial intelligence (AI) never ceases to challenge our certainties in the field of patent law, even if it means taking us out of the summer torpor. The latest feat in this field comes from Dr. Stephen Thaler1, who has been trying to have AI recognised as an inventor for several years.
Dr. Thaler is the proud applicant of a PCT application2 for both a food container and a device to attract attention, inventions that he claims were made by the AI DABUS (Device for the Autonomous Bootstrapping of Unified Sentience). DABUS would thus be able to appreciate its creations through its own learning rules, allowing it to make affective responses close to those of a human being.
Although Botox has been on the market since 1993, work continues to improve its composition. Currently, pharma innovators Allergan and Ipsen are locked in a battle over new Botox patents at the European Patent Office.
On 2 September 2021, the Technical Boards of Appeal ruled on their first Botox case (case ID: T 2797/18 – 3.3.07). The judges reversed the Opposition Division’s decision to quash Allergan’s EP 2 33 294. As a result, the Opposition Division must now retry the case and resolve further issues.
Allergan’s EP 294 protects a pharmaceutical composition of clostridial toxins. Clostridia are a type of bacteria, which includes clostridium botulinum. Its neurotoxin forms the basis of Allergan’s successful product Botox and Ipsen’s competing product Dysport. The best-known use of the neurotoxin is to smooth out wrinkles, but the substance is also used in medicine, for example to treat specific movement disorders and spasms.
Analysts estimate that Allergan alone will generate about $4.7 billion in global sales from Botox in three years.
The Brazilian President gave his assent to the bill introducing new rules on the compulsory licensing of patents, which facilitates the compulsory licensing of COVID-19 vaccines’ patents. The Brazilian President vetoed, however, certain key provisions of the bill, including paragraphs 8, 9 and 10 of the amended Article 71 of the Brazilian Industrial Property Act 1996.
Paragraph 8 places on patent proprietors and patent applicants the obligation to disclose to licensees the information and data necessary and sufficient for the use of subject-matter of the patent or patent application, including the test results and data required to obtain the approval for use by the competent authority. Paragraph 9 also creates the obligation of the patent proprietor or patent applicant to supply to the licensees the biological material necessary for the use of the subject-matter. And pursuant to paragraph 10, if the patent proprietor or patent applicant does not comply with these obligations, the patent is subject to revocation and the patent application may be denied.
At its core, the International Trade Commission (ITC) was created to be a trade court protecting American companies from unfair foreign competition. There are two constraints on the ITC that are intended to make sure that’s the role it takes—the domestic industry requirement, where the ITC can’t hear a patent case if there isn’t a domestic industry using the patent, and the public interest requirement, where the ITC can’t exclude a product if it determines the public interest would be disserved by doing so.
But since its creation, the ITC has shifted significantly from that role, taking on a role that protects patent owners, regardless of their origin. The prototypical ITC case, with American complainants targeting foreign respondents, made up less than 5% of ITC cases in 2020. Part of that shift is the availability of domestic industry via licensing to unwilling licensees who created a product before they took a license. And the public interest provision has been so heavily cabined that it is effectively never applied to deny an exclusion order.
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Just as importantly, the AAIA would return the public interest inquiry to the forefront of the ITC’s responsibilities. While the ITC currently is obligated to consider the public interest before issuing an exclusion order, that process is more or less pro forma—it almost never results in a denial of exclusion, with the ITC allowing a patent owner’s rights in its patents to outweigh interests in competition, health and welfare, and other such factors. Instead of requiring the ITC to find that the public interest justifies not excluding the product in order to not issue an exclusion order, the AAIA would require that the ITC affirmatively determine that the public interest justifies exclusion in order to issue an exclusion order. This change of default would revitalize a public interest process that just doesn’t work the way it’s supposed to.As Rep. DelBene stated when reintroducing the bill, “[b]y modernizing the ITC with this bill, we can help ensure the public interest is always put first as the commission adjudicates.” For an agency intended to protect American companies and American consumers, that public interest ought to be a high priority—and these changes will help ensure that it is.
Chief Judge Gerard F. Rogers has announced the appointment of Marth B. Allard as an Administrative Trademark Judge at the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board. Judge Allard's duties commenced on August 1, 2021. This appointment brings the total number of TTAB judges to 27, including Chief Judge Rogers and Deputy Chief Judge Mark Thurmon. The current roster of TTAB judges may be found here.
Australia’s Parliament has recently passed the Designs Amendment (Advisory Council on Intellectual Property Response) Bill 2020 to allow designers more flexibility and simplify the designs system. Royal Assent was granted on 10 September 2021. Key changes to the Designs Act 2003 (Cth) include a 12-month grace period to apply for a design, a prior user exemption, providing exclusive licensees with legal standing, and clarification of the ‘informed user’ standard. In addition, Australia differs from EU law in that it requires identifying a person familiar with the product, as opposed to potential users, concerning registration and infringement matters.
These reforms come after a lengthy consultation period by IP Australia before announcing in 2020 plans to implement the former Advisory Council on Intellectual Property (ACIP) recommendations from its 2015 review of the Australian designs system. Despite this, IP Australia does not consider protection is warranted for virtual or non-physical designs (eg GUIs) and protecting parts of products (partial designs) at this time.
