The Kubernetes in-tree storage plugin to Container Storage Interface (CSI) migration infrastructure has already been beta since v1.17. CSI migration was introduced as alpha in Kubernetes v1.14.
Since then, SIG Storage and other Kubernetes special interest groups are working to ensure feature stability and compatibility in preparation for GA. This article is intended to give a status update to the feature as well as changes between Kubernetes 1.17 and 1.23. In addition, I will also cover the future roadmap for the CSI migration feature GA for each storage plugin.
Hackaday editors Elliot Williams and Mike Szczys get caught up on the week that was. People go to great lengths for video game saves, but this Pokemon hack that does hardware-based trade conversion between the Game Boy’s Pokemon 2 and Pokemon 3 is something else. Why do we still use batteries when super capacitors exist? They’re different components, silly, and work best at different things. Turns out you can study the atmosphere by sending radio waves through it, and that’s exactly what the ESA is doing… around Mars! And will machined parts become as easy to custom order as PCBs have become? This week we take a closer look at prototyping as a service.
A Quick overview of deepin 20.3
With Intel's Atom x6000E "Elkhart Lake" SoCs there is a new block called the Programmable Services Engine (PSE) that is an Arm Cortex-M7 companion core that handles various tasks. Unfortunately, with the PSE it means a new binary-only firmware module. With the Programmable Services Engine likely to come with future Intel platforms too, Coreboot developers and open-source enthusiasts are calling on Intel to now open-source this firmware to avoid having this extra binary blob and further complicating future open-source firmware efforts.
The Programmable Services Engine can be used for embedded controller (EC) functionality, sensor handling, network proxy, remote management, and other in-band and out-of-band device management tasks. Elkhart Lake is the first generation featuring the PSE.
Sent to DRM-Next this week for queuing until the Linux 5.17 merge window in January is the latest batch of drm-intel-gt-next updates, which has hang fixes and more preparations for Intel discrete graphics.
There is already some Intel kernel graphics driver code that is queued for Linux 5.17, most notably including VRR support for Ice Lake. This week's drm-intel-gt-next has more notable changes for Intel's open-source driver that continues growing a lot for supporting their discrete graphics plans.
AMD is rolling out the first enablement patches of their next-generation EPYC Zen 4 CPUs and the new features incorporated within them for the Linux OS.
It's been over one month since the release of AMDVLK 2021.Q4.1 as the latest open-source AMD Vulkan driver update, which is off the wagon compared to the prior weekly/bi-weekly release cadence. But today thankfully it's been succeeded by AMDVLK 2021.Q4.2 as the newest driver release.
Since early November when the last AMDVLK open-source driver release occurred, AMDVLK has been seeing new activity to primarily keep up with the new Vulkan API extensions being introduced upstream. Most notable with AMDVLK 2021.Q4.2 is supporting Vulkan's new dynamic rendering support. Mesa's RADV (and Intel's ANV) have already been working on their dynamic rendering support too and NVIDIA has offered VK_KHR_dynamic_rendering in their beta driver since last month.
Back in 2002, if you were a hip PC gamer you were probably playing Grand Theft Auto Vice City on your brand new ATI Radeon R300 graphics card and listening to Avril Lavigne's "Sk8r Boi." Now that sk8r boi is probably a sk8r grandpa, the R300 is getting a new driver with a long-awaited bug fix.
According to Phoronix, the ATI Radeon R300, R400, and R500 graphics cards are getting a new open-source graphics driver under Linux that will breathe extra life into these near 20-year-old GPUs. The new open-source driver is made by developer Emma Anholt, and is designed to give these GPUs the ability to request NIR shaders from the Mesa 3D graphics library's state tracker and use the NIR to TGSI path.
NIR is an optimizing compiler stack that sits at the core of driver shader compilers from Mesa. Basically, it's an optimization layer that tries to reduce the amount of work a GPU has to do when running 3D applications.
It's been a while since last having a hearty BSD benchmark comparison on Phoronix in part due to the latest hardware platforms generally lagging behind with how well supported they are by the various BSDs. But stemming from a Phoronix Premium supporter recently requesting some fresh BSD benchmarks, here is a look at how DragonFlyBSD 6.0.1, FreeBSD 13.0, NetBSD 9.2, and OpenBSD 7.0 are competing against various Linux distributions like CentOS, Clear Linux, and Ubuntu.
To make this large BSD vs. Linux benchmark comparison possible, an Intel Core i9 10980XE "Cascade Lake X" workstation was used for testing as it is mature and worked well across all of the BSDs tested. There were not any issues with any of the BSDs tested from the onboard networking to storage and all other key functionality being in place. Intel hardware generally leads when it comes to newer platforms working well on the major BSDs while the AMD hardware support has been improving and AArch64 servers are also making progress on the major BSDs.
Liferea feed reader and news aggregator released version 1.13.7 a few days ago as the latest development release.
Liferea is a GTK+3 news reader with an embedded web browser. It supports for reading articles offline, force fetch full article text using HTML5 extraction, and subscribing to HTML5 websites that do not even have a feed.
It may also permanently save headlines in news bins, and supports for synchronizing with “TinyTinyRSS”, “TheOldReader”, and “Reedah”.
The 1.13.7 release continues working on the ‘Reader mode’. User now can toggle on/off Reader mode by right-clicking on lower right HTML view area via context menu option. And, it now allows to convert TinyTinyRSS subscriptions to local scriptions.
I already wrote about migrating from CentOS 8 to CentOS Stream. Now, I am migrating Linode VM from CentOS 8 to Rocky Linux 8. The server runs a very simple workload that includes PHP 8.1, MariaDB server and Nginx, and SELinux and firewalld.
In this tutorial, we are going to explore how to install Apache Netbeans 12.6 on Ubuntu 20.04.
NetBeans is an integrated development environment for java. Netbeans allows the development of applications from a set of modular software components called modules. NetBeans is part of the wider Apache family license that is why it is called Apache NetBeans.
In this article, we will see how to create an RDS MySql Instance using the Boto3 Library. We will use "create_db_instance" method to create an Instance.
Before we proceed, I assume that you are familiar with AWS RDS Service. If you are not familiar with it and what to first learn to create an RDS MySql Instance from the AWS Console, search for "How to setup an RDS MySql (Relation Database MySql ) instance on AWS?".
Vivaldi is a cross-platform web browser that's become increasingly popular among users who liked Opera before its Chromification.
Although it, too, is based on Chromium, its minimalistic user interface and features such as tab stacking and tiling, built-in ad blocker and trackers, custom themes, quick commands, etc., give it an edge over the likes of Chrome, Edge, and Brave.
If you're on Linux and keen to try out Vivaldi to see what the hype is about, here's a guide with instructions to help you out in the process.
LibreNMS is a free, open-source, web-based, and auto-discovering network monitoring tool written in PHP. It uses MySQL or MariaDB as a database backend and uses SNMP to discover the remote clients. It supports a wide range of network devices including, Linux, Cisco, Juniper, FreeBSD, HP, Windows, and more. It supports multiple authentication methods including, Radius, Active Directory, LDAP, MySQL, and more. It is simple, user-friendly, and easy for anyone to understand and use.
In this tutorial, I will explain how to install LibreNMS with Nginx on Debian 11.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Nmap on Debian 11. For those of you who didn’t know, Network Mapper (Nmap) is a free, open-source network security scanning tool. Nmap works by sending data packets on a specific target (by IP) and the incoming packets will be interpreted to determine what ports are open/closed, what services are running on the scanned system, whether firewalls or filters are set up and enabled, and finally what operating system is running.
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 Nmap network discovery and security auditing on a Debian 11 (Bullseye).
In this tutorial, I will walk you through Kubernetes architecture, control plane, and worker node components.
Control plane makes global decisions i.e scheduling tasks and also maintains cluster details in an etcd component.
This is a quick article to share a couple of ways in which you can quickly find and create .gitignore files for which ever technology or language you are working with.
A virtual machine allows you to run a second, fully functional system within your existing environment. Your computer becomes what is known as a host system. Then, any virtual machine you set up will be a guest system.
One of the best software solutions for creating virtual machines on Linux is VMware. It is free for non-commercial use and surprisingly easy to install and set up. Following is a quick walkthrough that will show you how to install VMware Player on your Linux workstation and create your first virtual machine.
Today we are looking at how to install Blender 3.0 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 only work on Chromebooks with an Intel or AMD CPU (with Linux Apps Support) and not those with an ARM64 architecture CPU.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Docker on Fedora 35. For those of you who didn’t know, Docker is a container-based application framework, which wraps up a specific application with all its dependencies in a container. Containers are usually isolated from one another and bundled their own software libraries and configuration files, they can communicate with each other through well-defined channels.
This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of the Docker Community Edition (CE) on a Fedora 35.
Bash Select construct is used to create a numbered menu from the list of items.
The purpose of this tutorial is to install PipeWire on Ubuntu Linux. PipeWire is a sound server that can handle playback and capturing of audio and video streams. It is a worthy replacement to other multimedia frameworks such as PulseAudio, which is the default on Ubuntu, and others.
PipeWire was developed by Wim Taymans at Red Hat, and aims to provide better handling of audio and video for Linux systems. It does so by providing lower lantency than other sound servers and also has a superior processing engine. The official site is pipewire.org. Another use case for installing PipeWire is if you are having audio compatibility problems on Ubuntu, such as your Bluetooth device not working.
In this tutorial, we will cover the step by step instructions to install PipeWire on Ubuntu Linux. You will also see how to use PipeWire as your main sound server on Ubuntu, which replaces PulseAudio. We will also show how to revert the changes, in case you decide that PipeWire is not for you and you want to restore to system defaults.
In this tutorial, we will learn the commands to install a VNC server on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Focal or Ubuntu 18.04 Bionic using the terminal to access Gnome Linux graphic user interface, remotely.
KDE is currently available in version 5.20 while doing this tutorial. The main focus of this Linux desktop environment is on providing wide range of customization options. Here we will see the commands to install KDE Plasma’s latest and testing desktop version on Debian 11 Bullseye server or desktop using the terminal.
Users who have used Windows will defnatley find KDE desktop environment on their Linux quite familiar. KDE is popular becuase of its beautiful interface, sleek icons and lots of tools and apps developed by KDE community. Further, if one doesn’t like the arrangements of elements then he or she can position the Widgets, Taskbar and almost every element to get the look and feel he/she wants. However, the variety of options can make inexperienced users quickly overwhelmed. Hence, you might have to invest time to become aware and comfortable with it.
this is a sample-example apt sources.list, because the perfect sources.list it is science for itself
(this is not an perfect sources.list but one that was tested and works)
right now not including non-free would mean lenovo laptop users can use LAN but not WIFI.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Docker on Fedora 35. For those of you who didn’t know, Docker is a container-based application framework, which wraps up a specific application with all its dependencies in a container. Containers are usually isolated from one another and bundled their own software libraries and configuration files, they can communicate with each other through well-defined channels.
This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of the Docker Community Edition (CE) on a Fedora 35.
RPM Fusion is a repository of add-on packages for Rhel-type distributions and EL+EPEL that a group of community volunteers maintains. RPM Fusion is not a standalone repository but an extension of Almalinux’s default packages that could not be included due to AlmaLinux being bound by the same legal restrictions as Red Hat.
The RPM Fusion repository comes in two flavors, Free and Non-Free. The free repository contains a free version of the software that is open source and non-free, which have mostly almost all free software but are closed source and mainly proprietary.
In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install RPM Fusion on your AlmaLinux 8 distribution.
balenaEtcher is a free and open-source flashing utility tool famous for writing image files such as .iso and .img files and zipped folders onto storage media to create live SD cards and USB flash drives. balenaEtcher has cross-platform support on Linux, BSD, macOS, and Windows and is developed by balena and licensed under Apache License 2.0.
In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install baelnaEtcher on Fedora 35 and create a Linux distribution boot disk.
In this tutorial, we are going to learn about DataStax Astra DB, how to create a database with Astra DB, how to load sample data to the database and finally how to connect the databases.
Before getting started with Astra DB, let me give you a brief introduction to Astra DB.
Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish Linux, the latest long term support release from Canonical, is due to come out on April 21, 2022. As with all new LTS versions of Ubuntu, it will have a newer kernel version from other past releases of Ubuntu.
In this tutorial, we will discuss the kernel of Ubuntu 22.04, and show you how to check the kernel version on your own system. You will also see how to upgrade or downgrade the kernel version in Ubuntu.
Canonical prides itself on making their Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish Linux operating system very simple to use, even if you do not have a lot of technical knowledge. Despite its simplicity, Ubuntu has a lot going on under the hood to make things work, including networking configuration that allows you to connect to local devices or servers across the world.
Although Ubuntu and its networking settings should normally, and ideally, work without a hitch, there may come a time where you need to roll up your sleeves and do some tinkering to get things sorted out. Or, maybe you’re just curious about various network configuration on the system.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to get started with network configuration on Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish. This can include simple tasks like viewing your system’s IP address, to more complex things like restarting your networking service, which may come in handy when troubleshooting network issues. Read on to start learning about network configuration on Ubuntu 22.04.
In film post-production, there's a phase called compositing, which puts the actual footage in a camera with footage generated purely by software. What that actually means to the compositing artist depends on the movie. Sometimes there are just a few overlays, other times there's some minor special effect like laser beams or explosions, sometimes it's a green screen, and still other times it's a little bit of everything. Most video editing applications can do basic compositing. Still, when your entire job is to bring different components together and make it look like they were in front of the camera in real life at the time of the shooting, you need a dedicated application with some very specific tooling. Happily, the film industry does a lot more with open source and cross-studio collaboration than you might expect, and so some of the best tools to process digital images (including OpenColorIO, OpenEXR, OpenFX, and more) have become ubiquitous. The compositing application Natron takes advantage of this open technology, plus the time-honored interface models of "noodles and nodes," to bring professional compositing to open source software users.
Compositing is a big and complex job, but this article introduces you to the basics of what you need to know about the interface of Natron and some basic principles of compositing. After reading this, you won't be a pro, but you'll know where to begin.
The Wine development release 7.0-rc1 is now available.
This is the first release candidate for the upcoming Wine 7.0. It marks the beginning of the yearly code freeze period. Please give this release a good testing and report any issue that you find, to help us make 7.0 as good as possible.
What's new in this release (see below for details): - Reimplementation of the WinMM joystick driver. - All Unix libraries converted to the syscall-based interface. - Various bug fixes.
The source is available from the following locations:
https://dl.winehq.org/wine/source/7.0/wine-7.0-rc1.tar.xz http://mirrors.ibiblio.org/wine/source/7.0/wine-7.0-rc1.tar.xz
Binary packages for various distributions will be available from:
https://www.winehq.org/download
You will find documentation on https://www.winehq.org/documentation
You can also get the current source directly from the git repository. Check https://www.winehq.org/git for details.
Wine is available thanks to the work of many people. See the file AUTHORS in the distribution for the complete list.
Following last week's Wine 6.23 development release, Wine 7.0-rc1 was just declared in marking the end of feature development and beginning preparations for issuing Wine 7.0.0 stable in January.
Per the Wine 7.0 release planning, Wine 7.0-rc1 was issued today to mark the feature freeze and begin what will be weekly release candidates. Those weekly release candidates will continue until Wine 7.0 is determined to be ready to officially released. Current plans and what has happened in prior years with the same annual release cadence means that stable release should be out sometime in January.
Hi everyone!
Since the last Wayland driver update [1] a lot of work has been done to improve the functionality and stability of the Wine Wayland driver, and to provide a cleaner and more reviewable/upstreamable patchset. The driver has now reached a point where it would benefit from wider community testing.
In the mailing list discussions earlier this year it was recommended that we go through wine-staging as a stepping stone towards upstream. To this end, I have prepared a patchset and attached it to the existing bug for a Wayland driver, as per the wine-staging guidelines, at:
https://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=42284
This is intended to be an active patchset, meaning that it will receive updates regularly, as feedback is received and issues are fixed. Development will continue in the development branch (currently at [2]) which will be used as the canonical source for any updated patchsets for wine-staging.
The vast majority (but not all) of the commits in the series affect only the driver itself. However, there is still a lot of surface area, mostly in terms of interfaces used to interact with Wine core, that could lead to broken code when upstream is updated. This has been more pronounced the last few weeks with the various changes in the driver interface.
I will be tracking upstream and providing updated patchsets as needed and as timely as I can. I want to make sure that this patchset will not cause undue burden on the wine-staging maintainers. However, if the maintainers feel that this patchset will make life difficult for them, I am open to different ideas about how to move this driver towards upstream.
A related question now that holiday season is approaching: what happens if a wine-staging patch breaks due to an upstream change, such that it requires intervention from the original author, but this is not provided in time for the next release? Is the patchset disabled for that wine-staging release and re-enabled when fixed? Let me stress again that my aim is to track upstream and respond in a timely manner, but sometimes this is not possible, and I want to be clear about how the situation is handled.
While it won't make it for the upcoming Wine 7.0, the Wayland driver for natively supporting this X11 successor continues maturing and in the not too distant future will hopefully begin receiving more widespread testing via Wine-Staging.
Alexandros Frantzis has been leading the effort on the Wayland Wine driver to allow for Windows games/applications to run on Wayland compositors without having to go through XWayland. Much progress has been made and now Vulkan and other features are working.
ââ¬Æ Welcome back! For the last two months, I've been working on fixing regressions introduced by 0.9.0 (thanks to all the people who use try the development releases) and a few new features and enhancements that the community has been asking for.
Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from December 03 to December 10.
Arch Linux is famous for being its own thing, done in its own way. Most distributions are built on other distributions. Ubuntu is based on Debian, Manjaro is based on Arch, and Fedora is based on RedHat Linux.
Arch Linux isn’t based on anything. It was built from the ground up using the Linux kernel, the GNU utilities, its own package manager, and so on. Arch Linux lets the user decide exactly what they want to include or leave out of their operating system and applications. It’s the polar opposite of bloat. It’s just about the skinniest Linux you can get.
We just made it a WHOLE lot easier to Respin your Own distro from Makulu Shift, watch the video for details...
ââ¬â¹Kali Linux 2021.4 was released today by Offensive Security and includes further Apple M1 support, increased Samba compatibility, nine new tools, and an update for all three main desktop.
Kali Linux is a Linux distribution allowing cybersecurity professionals and ethical hackers to perform penetration testing and security audits against internal and remote networks.
Kali Linux 2021.4 has just been released by Offensive Security. The latest version includes a new set of tools as well a desktop and theme enhancements.
Kali Linux is a Debian-based Linux distribution designed for cybersecurity professionals and ethical hackers to perform penetration testing and security audits. It is sponsored by a US company called Offensive Security, who do information security training and penetration testing.
Kali Linux is a rolling release, which means that updates are released constantly, including feature updates. Nevertheless, there is also a quarterly release, which are a good moment to catch up on what is new in Kali.
The latest 2021.4 release brings some significant feature additions and improvements onboard. Let us check them out.
The developers of Kali Linux have announced the release of Kali Linux 2021.4, the last in the 2021 release cycle. Kali Linux is a Debian-based distribution targeted at security professionals, so all the best security tools for hacking and penetration testing (pentesting) are nicely packaged for easy access and use. This release comes exactly 7 days after I installed Kali Linux 2021.3 alongside Ubuntu 20.04.3 on a MacBook Air in dual-boot fashion.
Given that Kali Linux is a rolling release distribution, the difference between that up to date installation on my MacBook Air and this 2021.4 release is very minor, so all I had to do to match what you’ll get by downloading and installing it afresh is a simple sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade -y.
Life with Linux is good!
Here are a few screenshots from my installation of Kali Linux 2021.4. You may read all the new and updated features in the release notes and download a copy for installation from here, if you do not have Kali Linux installed on your computer already.
FreeBSD 12.3 is a minor update that involves bug fixes, and some userland updates.
For more details, you can check out its official blog post.
While the rolling release snapped its streak of continuous daily snapshots, Tumbleweed persists releasing numerous snapshots; in total, five have been released so far this week.
The last snapshot, 20211207, updated one package that gamers will appreciate. The computer opponent for the board game Blokus was updated with the release of pentobi 19.1. The bug fixing update provided a work around for a crash that happened during an exit in some situations. The package also avoids a warning with Qt 6 caused by a deprecated signal-handler syntax.
Snapshot 20211206 updated the 3D graphics package Mesa to version 21.3.1. The updated provided mostly AMD, Intel and Zink fixes. The package also added a work around to fix a segfault with the first-person shooter video game Metro Exodus, which announced availability with Linux in April 2021. The highly portable implementation of the Domain Name System protocol bind 9.16.23 fixed CVE-2021-25219 by disabling the lame server cache that would have allowed an attacker to significantly degrade resolver performance. There were some patches removed in the blog 2.26 update. Font rendering package freetype2 2.11.1 improved cmake support and updated the latest experimental COLRv1 Application Programming Interface to OpenType standard 1.9. Another rendering package poppler, which is for pdfs, updated to version 21.12.0 and added a few APIs; one to read/save to file descriptor; one to add images; and one to validate signatures. Many incremental improvements and bug fixes were made in the libvirt 7.10.0 update and a new feature is a binary that helps users figure out the format of Distinguished Name from a certificate file the way it expects in the tls_allowed_dn_list option of the libvirtd.conf configuration file. The userspace components for the Linux Kernel’s drivers and infiniband subsystem package rdma-core 38.0 was the only major version update in the snapshot; it updated kernel headers stddef.h. Other packages to update in the snapshot were gc 8.2.0, kImageAnnotator 0.5.3, strace 5.15 and more.
Unfortunately, we could not keep up the daily streak of snapshots during this week. We ‘only’ managed to push out 6 snapshots. Over the last weekend, we had an openQA-worker causing some troubles, which resulted in not sufficient throughput to get anything ready to publish. But 6 snapshots is still acceptable, isn’t it? Anyway, we had the following releases: 1202, 1203, 1205, 1206, 1207, and 1208.
Open vSwitch (OVS) is an open source framework for software-defined networking (SDN) and is useful in virtualized environments. Just like conventional network stacks, OVS can offload tasks to the hardware running on the network interface card (NIC) to speed up the processing of network packets.
However, dozens of functions are invoked in a chain to achieve hardware offload. This article takes you through the chain of functions to help you debug networking problems with OVS.
This article assumes that you understand the basics of OVS and hardware offload. To accompany your study of this article, you should be familiar with network commands, particularly Linux's tc (traffic control) command, in order to dump traffic flows and see whether they are offloaded.
For the flow illustrated in this article, I used a Mellanox NIC.
When pushing compute and cloud technologies to the edge of the network, the logistical approach to infrastructure provisioning needs to be hands-off. Is Zero Touch Provisioning (ZTP) a possibility? Are things ever really "zero?"
This post will provide an overview of ZTP, why it’s important when working with thousands of edge nodes, and how GitOps practices and Red Hat solutions are enabling more rapid deployment of mobile infrastructure—helping you manage your infrastructure at the edge.
As digital transformation and automation change the sysadmin role, make sure you're doing what's necessary to thrive through the transition.
If you’ve been daydreaming about making a career change, you’re not alone. But while it’s enticing to imagine yourself in the career of your dreams, getting there can be scary. Whether you’re jumping into a brand-new career path or leaving the industry you’ve been in for years, you need to prepare.
Here are five secrets to help you make your career jump as an IT professional.
After PHP 7.2, and as announced, PHP version 7.3.33 was the last official release of PHP 7.3
[...]
However, given the very important number of downloads by the users of my repository the version is still available in remi repository for Enterprise Linux (RHEL, CentOS...) and Fedora (Software Collections) and will include the latest security fix.
“Don’t mock the metaverse,” said The Economist in a November 20 article. “There are good reasons to take the metaverse seriously. One is historical: as computers have become more capable, the experiences which they generate have become richer. The internet began its life displaying nothing more exciting than white text on a black background. Flat images were added in the 1990s. Video came to dominate in the 2010s. On that reading, a move into three dimensions is a logical consequence of the steady growth in computing power.”
“The metaverse is already here. It’s just not evenly distributed,” the article added. “The video-game industry - the only type of entertainment fully exposed to the compounding power of Moore’s law - has been selling virtual worlds for years.” Online games like World of Warcraft, Fortnite, and Roblox have hundreds of millions of users, and their gaming companies have valuations in the tens of billions, - evidence that immersive virtual worlds can be popular and profitable. “It is hard to argue that an idea will never catch on when, for millions of people, it already has.”
3-D virtual environments have had limited success beyond the video-game industry. But this could change. Leading technology companies have announced plans to expand their use in business, education, social media, and other so-called serious applications. On October 28, Mark Zuckerberg announced his commitment to a metaverse strategy by rebranding Facebook as Meta Platforms. A week or so later, Satya Nadella shared Microsoft’s metaverse plans, starting with enabling users of Mesh for Microsoft Teams to interact and collaborate in 3-D immersive workspaces.
Red Hat is bringing Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform to Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform. The collaboration between Red Hat and Microsoft delivers a powerful solution that provides customers flexibility in how they adopt automation to deliver any application, anywhere, without additional overhead or complexity.
Red Hat and Microsoft customers now don’t have to worry about deploying and configuring a solution that can address enterprise-class use cases. Instead, they can start working immediately on complex scenarios like automated OS configuration, application provisioning, network automation, infrastructure as code (IaC) and security orchestration.
We are pleased to announce that Red Hat Satellite 6.10 Tuning Guide has been released.
This guide has been prepared to provide guidance on how to optimize Red Hat Satellite 6.10 performance with respect to hardware and software configuration. As well, information is provided on how to use the Installer-based auto-tuning function to provide greater simplicity.
Here’s your weekly Fedora report. Read what happened this week and what’s coming up. Your contributions are welcome (see the end of the post)!
I have weekly office hours on Wednesdays in the morning and afternoon (US/Eastern time) in #fedora-meeting-1. Drop by if you have any questions or comments about the schedule, Changes, elections, or anything else. See the upcoming meetings for more information.
Linux Mint 20.3 was unveiled in early October 2021 and it’s scheduled for release near the Christmas holidays. The Linux Mint team already shared some of the new features coming to this update in the Linux Mint 20 series, which is based on the Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa) operating system series and supported for 5 years.
Based on the Ubuntu 20.04.3 LTS release, Linux Mint 20.3 beta sticks to the Linux 5.4 LTS kernel to minimize any failures that may occur during upgrades from Linux Mint 20.2 “Uma” or a previous version.
One of the system’s 4x GbE ports enables the high-throughput EtherCAT fieldbus protocol and supports a wide range of EtherCAT slave (AKA EtherCAT-Secondary) devices. The EtherCAT implementation offers time-deterministic synchronous control for automation and is compatible with third-party EtherCAT assistive-module support, “giving operators freedom to choose different motors and I/O based on cost/performance needs,” says Avalue. The SLP-WHG enables EtherCAT cycle times up to 125üs and offers up to 128-axis motion control and 11200 I/O point control, says Avalue.
Other Linux-ready EtherCAT ready systems include Taicenn’s Atom D2550 based TBOX-4000 and WAGO’s Cortex-A8 powered PFC200. The SLP-WHG is based on Avalue’s EMX-WHLGP thin Mini-ITX board we covered in Mar. 2020.
Get the wireless support you want on the latest Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W.
The new Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W is an exciting successor to the original Pi Zero W, but some makers insist it has a few areas of improvement that need to be addressed. Brian Dorey has taken matters into his own hands by upgrading the latest board to use an external antenna for wireless connections.
The modification is possible thanks to a U.FL connector. This module is responsible for bridging the connection between the external antenna and Pi Zero 2 W. According to Dorey, it was able to detect 14 Wi-Fi networks with an external antenna but only four without it.
Cincoze’s rugged, fanless “DI-1100” embedded PC has an 8th Gen CPU, up to 64GB DDR4, triple display support, 2x GbE, 2x COM, 6x USB (including 2x Gen2) and expansion via 2x mini-PCIe with SIM and Cincoze CFI and CFM modules.
Cincoze announced a highly expandable embedded computer with dual mini-PCIe slots plus the company’s Combined Multiple I/O (CMI) and Control Function Module (CFM) interfaces. The DI-1100 follows the 6th Gen Skylake based DI-1000 and advances to the similarly 15W TDP 8th Gen Whiskey Lake platform. The 203 x 142 x 66.8mm system supports applications including autonomous robots, in-vehicle use, and environmental monitoring computers.
StarFive has just announced customers’ delivery of the 64-bit RISC-V Dubhe core based on RV64GC ISA plus bit manipulation, user-level interrupts, as well as the latest Vector 1.0 (V) and Hypervisor (H) instructions.
StarFive Dubhe can be clocked up to 2 GHz on a 12nm TSMC process node, and the company also released performance numbers with a SPECint2006 score of 8.9/GHz, a Dhrystone score of 6.6 DMIPS/MHz, and a CoreMark score of 7.6/MHz. A third-party source told CNX Software it should be equivalent to the SiFive Performance P550 RISC-V core announced last summer, itself comparable to Cortex-A75.
[Paul Curtis] over at Segger has an interesting series of blog posts about calculating division. This used to be a hotter topic, but nowadays many computers or computer languages have support for multiplication and division built-in. But some processors lack the instructions and a library to do it might be less than ideal. Knowing how to roll your own might allow you to optimize for speed or space. The current installment covers using Newton’s algorithm to do division.
Steve Martin had a famous bit about how to be a millionaire and never pay taxes. He started out by saying, “First… get a million dollar. Then…” This method is a bit like that since you first have to know how to multiply before you can divide. The basic premise is twofold: Newton’s method let you refine an estimate of a reciprocal by successive multiplications and then multiplying a number a reciprocal is the same as dividing. In other words, if we need to divide 34 by 6, you could rewrite 36/6 to 36 * 1/6 and the answer is the same.
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We liked that the post has a fixed-point implementation and then examines the resulting assembly code for ARM, RISC-V, and dsPIC30. Well worth a read.
That was fairly complicated, I admit. I wish there was a simpler way to edit the Firefox UI, but unfortunately, if you're not happy with Firefox's default looks, and you want to alter them beyond the basic customization available, you will need CSS knowledge, CSS files, and a bunch of rules. This guide outlines how you can achieve that, without going into every specific detail of the browser's interface.
I am fully aware that this isn't a trivial task. CSS looks "easy" to those who know how to use it, but it also creates aversion, justifiably, with ordinary people seeking simple ergonomic solutions. I believe the right way is to actually invest a little bit of time and master this lingo, as it gives you the freedom to make the necessary adjustments to the UI, without relying on arbitrary decisions out there somewhere. I wish Mozilla was making better choices, but hey, even with all this nonsense piled into Firefox, it's still the best browser, it allows you to change the interface, and it's the one browser you should use on your desktop and mobile. It's the only thing that makes the Internet still barely usable, and you will not like the future without Firefox. So grab the CSS, get rid of the annoyances, and continue using Firefox. We're done here.
Debian is having problems with a current version of Firefox that leaves users with a dangerously outdated browser.
One of the grey-bearded elders of the Linux distro world, Debian has had issues with Mozilla before. For years, it built its own forks of the Mozilla apps – Iceweasel, Icedove, Iceape, and Iceowl – because of a disagreement over trademark use. But this time the issues are technical rather than legal.
As a conservative, stable distro, Debian includes the Extended Support Release (ESR) version of Firefox – ideal for those who find Mozilla's four-weekly release cycle a bit too rapid.
The big new feature, besides speculative AOT JIT which doesn't apply to us yet, is RLBox, which compiles certain third-party libraries into safe WebAssembly, and then compiles them back into C, so they can be compiled a third time into pre-sanitized native code. This has obvious security benefits and the performance impact shouldn't be especially large, but it adds yet another build-time prerequisite: the WASI SDK. This kind of really sucks because now you have to have a third toolchain (it builds one whether you like it or not) besides clang and our preferred compiler, gcc. Pending internal package support, some distros have chosen simply to disable this for the immediate future, even including Fedora.
How calc's autofilter looks today under gtk3 + wayland in trunk towards LibreOffice 7.4
Back in 2018 for the Linux 4.18 kernel was introducing the Restartable Sequences system call for allowing faster user-space operations on per-CPU data. By avoiding atomic operations in cases like incrementing per-CPU counters, modifying per-CPU spinlocks, reading/writing to per-CPU ring buffers, and similar, Restartable Sequences can provide a performance advantage. The GNU C Library is landing its revised support for making use of this system call.
Restartable Sequences has shown nice performance potential and generated interest among developers. Glibc has been working on utilizing Restartable Sequences and the initial code was merged in 2020. More background information on RSEQ can be learned at Efficios.com from their work over the years on this support.
One of the little ways I've supported the cause is by keeping my personal blog site open from the very beginning. I do this partly to let people see the history of changes behind each page. But I also do it because, when I started using Jekyll, I didn't find many open source Jekyll blogs to learn from. My hope is that keeping my website open and exposing my trials and errors will save someone else a lot of time.
Guido van Rossum has posted the sad news that longtime Python contributor Fredrik Lundh has died.
drgn (pronounced “dragon”) is a debugger that exposes the types and variables in a program for easy, expressive scripting in Python. The Linux kernel team at Meta originally built drgn to make it easier to investigate the kinds of difficult Linux kernel bugs that the team encounters at Meta. The team has since added further use cases for it, like monitoring and userspace memory profiling. This blog discusses why we built drgn, how drgn works, how to use it, and what the team would like to do with drgn next.
The bug, tracked by CVE-2021-44228, likely affects almost any Java application using log4j, which is quite a few considering how ubiquitous it is. If your application ever logs a string sent in by a user, it’s probably vulnerable. As far as exploits go, it’s one of the worst ones this year, as it can target basically any server running Java in some fashion (though the primary attack vector may be harder on modern JDK versions, more on that below).
Essentially, the exploit allows an attacker to send your server any string like the following, and if it logs it somewhere in your app, your server will execute code hosted at that address.
Obviously, losing an eye would be bad for your vision. But if you think about it, it is also a detriment to your appearance. You might not need a prosthetic eye, and you can certainly rock an eye patch, but a lot of people with this problem get an artificial or “glass” eye. These glass eyes are hand-painted disks that fit into the eye socket. However, a British man now has a new kind of eye prosthesis that is 3D printed, a technology that can potentially cut waiting time for patients in half.
The existing process is lengthy because it requires taking a mold of the eye socket and manually matching the remaining eye with the new artificial eye. With the 3D printed technology, scans of the eye socket and the other eye make this process much simpler.
There are many ways to create printed circuit boards, but one of the more traditional ways involves using boards coated with photoresist and exposing the desired artwork on the board, usually with UV light. Then you develop the board like a photograph and etch it in acid. Where the photoresist stays, you’ll wind up with copper traces. Hackers have used lots of methods to get that artwork ranging from pen plotters to laser printers, but commercially a machine called a photoplotter created the artwork using a light and a piece of film. [JGJMatt] sort of rediscovered this idea by realizing that a cheap laser engraver could directly draw on the photoresist.
[NanoRobotGeek] had a single glorious weekend between the end of the term and the start of exams. Did they buy a keg and party it up? No, in fact, quite the opposite — they probably gained a few brain cells by free-form soldering this beautiful chirping bird pendant at 0603 instead.
The relative ease of building the individual components that make up an analog synth make it very tempting to DIY your own. That’s what [Albert Nyström] did and the result is this great looking, and great sounding, analog synth.
The VCOs in his monosynth are based around the AS3340 VCO chip, which is a clone of the Curtis Electromusic Specialties‘ CEM3340 chip (used in machines such as the Oberheim OB-Xa, the Roland Jupiter-6, and the Sequential Circuits Prophet-5 among others.) The voltage controlled filters are based on Moritz Klein’s VACTROL based VCF circuits, and the envelopes based on Thomas Henry’s 555 envelope circuits (Google searches will dig those up pretty quickly, as well as schematics for builds using the CEM chip.) Finally, the keyboard is a donor from an Arturia Keystep. While there are no step-by-step build instructions, or a schematic, we do have some info about the instrument. As you can see from some of the gut shots, it should be fairly easy to figure how [Albert] has put everything together. Or not.
Contactless payment by means of NFC-enabled bank cards has made our everyday transactions far more convenient over the last decade, but there still remains the tedious task of finding the card and waving it over the reader. Maybe embedded chips are a step too far for many of us, but how about a bank card in a wearable such as a ring? [Jonathan Limén] shows us how, by taking the NFC chip module from a bank card and mounting it on a ring with a wire coil antenna embedded within it.
It’s no secret that Microsoft frequently uses Windows to push its own products. The latest tactic is pop-ups that appear when you visit the Chrome download page. Google does something similar, but it can only use web prompts. On Windows 11, Microsoft is using native prompts and notifications that are not available to developers.
Have you made the jump to Windows 11? While there aren't yet any "killer apps" for Microsoft's new OS, it's easy to understand (as a fellow enthusiast) the desire to try out the latest thing. Windows 11 brings along some important under-the-hood refinements for new and upcoming hardware, so in the near future it may be a good move, but for now, most folks are probably better-served by the more-familiar and understood Windows 10.
Then again, perhaps some of those aforementioned under-the-hood refinements are responsible for the technical issues that Microsoft's new baby has been facing. There were multiple issues on launch with AMD CPUs, a problem where the "chkdsk" tool could damage SSDs, and many users have reported general performance issues, including an overall "laggy" or "sloppy" feeling to the new OS.
Security updates have been issued by Debian (python-babel), Fedora (golang-github-opencontainers-image-spec and libmysofa), openSUSE (hiredis), Oracle (firefox and thunderbird), Red Hat (thunderbird and virt:8.2 and virt-devel:8.2), Scientific Linux (thunderbird), SUSE (kernel-rt and xen), and Ubuntu (firefox).
The Apache Software Foundation has released a security advisory to address a remote code execution vulnerability (CVE-2021-44228) affecting Log4j versions 2.0-beta9 to 2.14.1. A remote attacker could exploit this vulnerability to take control of an affected system. Log4j is an open-source, Java-based logging utility widely used by enterprise applications and cloud services.
The diffoscope maintainers are pleased to announce the release of diffoscope version 196. This version includes the following changes:
[ Roland Clobus ] * Add a comment/annotation when the GNU_BUILD_ID field has been modified.
[ Brent Spillner ] * Fix the "Black" version detection.
[ Chris Lamb ] * Replace "token" with anonymous variable "x" in order to remove extra lines.
Researchers at f-secure have developed an impressive new attack, leveraging HP printers as an unexpected attack surface. Printing Shellz (PDF) is a one-click attack, where simply visiting a malicious webpage is enough to get a shell and reverse proxy installed to a printer on the same network. The demo below uses a cross-site printing (XSP) attack to send the malicious print job to the printer without any further interactions.
A January 2021 FBI document outlines what types of data and metadata can be lawfully obtained by the FBI from messaging apps. Rolling Stone broke the story and it’s been written about elsewhere.
I don’t see a lot of surprises in the document. Lots of apps leak all sorts of metadata: iMessage and WhatsApp seem to be the worst. Signal protects the most metadata. End-to-end encrypted message content can be available if the user uploads it to an unencrypted backup server.
Friday, December 10th, 2021 -- A global community of activists is taking part today in the Defective by Design campaign's 15th annual International Day Against DRM (IDAD) to protest use of Digital Restrictions Management, a widespread technology that places unethical restrictions on how people access digital media. Though from different backgrounds, countries, and perspectives, participants in the campaign share the common cause of opposing DRM in all of its forms. This year's target is Disney+'s streaming platform.
Led by the Free Software Foundation (FSF), the Defective by Design campaign is mobilizing activists to spread awareness on Disney+'s use of DRM by leaving negative reviews on its app store listings. This is joined by a general call to unsubscribe from streaming platforms that restrict their offerings with DRM, and a challenge to go a "day without DRM" as a way to raise awareness of publishers and storefronts that intentionally refrain from using it, such as those cataloged by the campaign's Guide to DRM-free Living.
Due to recent developments in Germany, Slovenia and Austria, where parliaments gave their support to the Protocol for Provisional Application of the Unified Patent Court Agreement, it is likely that after many years of delay the new Court will open its doors in 2022 and also the Unitary Patent will finally see the light of day. According to the architects of the Unitary Patent package, it will make the Europe-wide enforcement of patents easier, offer greater legal certainty and reduce litigation costs. But not everybody is convinced. Prof. Dr. Thomas Jaeger, European law expert of the University of Vienna, is an outspoken opponent of the Unitary Patent system, which he calls “a recipe for disaster”. Kluwer IP Law interviewed him.
Makers of vitro diagnostics (IVDs) are facing several significant challenges in the next few years, thanks to existing and impending revisions to a number of regulatory frameworks. There are other considerations that are adding to the headwinds, such as a poor patent protection environment in the U.S., the net effect of which is to make life unusually miserable for developers of these tests.
