The Manjaro Linux folks have teamed up with Minisforum to bring a very small but quite mighty system with the DeskMini UM700 Ãâ Manjaro Linux. Exciting? Well, it's basically rebrand of the existing EliteMini UM700 only it has Manjaro Linux instead of Windows 10 - and the first 1,000 orders get a free copy of CrossOver Linux.
Interestingly enough, this is pretty much the same box that Valve showed a pictured of them using in their developer documentation when talking about sorting a system for developing for Steam Deck without a Dev-Kit.
The MINISFORUM UM700 is a small desktop computer that measures 5ââ¬Â³ x 5ââ¬Â³ x 1.8ââ¬Â³ and features a 35-watt AMD Ryzen 7 3750H processor. First released more than a year ago, the little computer has been available for around $569 and up ever since, with Windows 10 Pro pre-installed.
But now you can also opt to purchase the DeskMini UM700 with Manjaro Linux pre-installed instead.
When it comes to computers, there are two things that really get my motor running -- AMD processors and Linux-based operating systems. So when I learned MINISFORUM had begun selling a diminutive AMD Ryzen-powered desktop that comes with Manjaro Linux pre-installed, my heart skipped a beat. It is very exciting to see yet another computer being offered with Linux rather than Windows.
Called "DeskMini UM700," the mini Linux desktop PC is being offered in three configurations -- all powered by the very capable Ryzen 7 3750H APU -- with pricing starting at less than $500. In other words, the tiny computer isn't just capable, but affordable too.
Continuing to put their money where their mouth is, the team at Framework are keeping things open and they've just announced the source code release for their Embedded Controller firmware.
What they're using is actually based on Google's chromium-ec project, which is the EC firmware used in Chromebooks. They've put the code up on GitHub under the BSD license. They didn't have to do this but it's great to see and keeps up with their commitment to allow people to do whatever they want with the Framework Laptop, which is one of the most exciting laptops we've seen for some time now.
Join Hackaday Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Managing Editor Tom Nardi as they bring you up to speed on the best stories and projects from the week. There’s some pretty unfortunate news for the physical media aficionados in the audience, but if you’re particularly keen on 50 year old integrated circuits, you’ll love hearing about the winners of the 555 Timer Contest. We’ll take a look at a singing circuit sculpture powered by the ESP32, extol the virtues of 3D printed switches, follow one hacker’s dream of building the ultimate Star Trek tricorder prop, and try to wrap our heads around how electronic devices can be jolted into submission. Stick around to the end as we take a close look at some extraordinary claims about sniffing out computer viruses, and wrap things up by wondering why everyone is trying to drive so far.
We're back for more LFS, last week we didn't make a ton of progress but hopefully this week it goes at least a little bit better but I'm not making any promises
In this video, I am going to show an overview of Linux Mint 20.3 "Una" Xfce and some of the applications pre-installed.
This is my segment where I like to look back in time and see how the world of technology has advanced and how things have stayed the same. I find we often forget how far we have come and how good we have it while not always remember how we got here. Having some historical perspective on computers and technology can help to drive some appreciation for what we have today.
The latest Linux 5.17 Kernel drivers have added improved support for AMD's upcoming Zen 4 & Zen 4C cores for next-gen EPYC & Ryzen CPUs.
While it can be a struggle to make ends meet, it’s possible to make life easier through better money management. Financial management is about planning income and expenditure and making informed decisions that enable you to survive financially. With today’s financial pressures, it’s even more important to look after your finances, if only to make sure there are no nasty surprises when you receive your next bank statement.
One way of staying alert regarding your financial position is to use a stock ticker. This is software that provides live updates of stock prices and enables you to easily monitor your investments. Alternatively, you can use software that fetches prices on-demand.
FTP server container stands for “File Transfer Protocol” and is an excellent protocol for downloading files from a remote or local server or uploading files onto the server. Using FTP proves to be a primary task after it has been set up correctly. It works by having a server listening for connections (on port 21 by default) from clients. The clients can access a remote directory with their user account and then download or upload files there, depending on the permissions that have been granted to them. It’s also possible to configure anonymous authorization, which means users will not need their account to connect to the FTP server.
On Centos Linux, there are many different FTP server containers and client software packages available. You can even use default GUI and command-line tools as an FTP client. In addition, a stylish and highly-configurable FTP server package is vsftpd, known for many Linux systems, including Centos. This guide will go over the step-by-step instructions to install vsftpd on Centos. We’ll also see how to configure the container FTP server through various settings, then use the command line, GNOME GUI, or FTP client software to connect to the FTP server. Creating FTP users tutorial.
It’s easy to take for granted the importance of having a server backup — until you experience a system failure, a natural disaster, or a malware attack. This can potentially paralyze your business through the loss of vital records such as financial and customer data. Your ability to recover will only be as good as your last backup.
Server backups provide the much-needed confidence that data is not lost and can be recovered in case of any eventuality. However, each operating system has a different way to handle this, and while some provide built-in utilities to accomplish this, others must be established from the ground up. Like many other areas of management, Linux operating systems have more options, but require more knowledge to set them up successfully.
Ghost is a popular content creation platform that’s written in JavaScript with Node.js. The open-source software comes with everything you need to author, theme, publish, and maintain your own blog.
Ghost is open-source software supported by the official Ghost(Pro) hosted service. You can install it on your own server by adding Node.js and using the Ghost CLI to set up your stack. Ghost is also available as a Docker image which bundles all the dependencies for you.
In this guide, we’ll use Docker to quickly get a new Ghost blog operational. Install Docker and Docker Compose on your host before proceeding any further. While you can deploy Ghost using Docker alone, Compose makes it simpler to supply and manage the config values your site will need to get started.
While the Linux command ls€ can display the sizes of files, it doesn’t work properly with directories, which will always be displayed as 4096 bytes. You’ll need to use the du€ command to recurse into subdirectories and print out a total.
Once you’ve set up a new Linux PC, one of your first tasks should be to change your Linux password. After all, one of the most important parts of keeping your computer secure is creating a secure password that others can’t guess or crack.
Whether you’re running macOS, Windows, or Linux, it’s crucial to be mindful of your password and change it regularly. So, how do you change your password in Linux? It’s a pretty straightforward process, so let’s take a look.
Today we are looking at how to install Roblox Studio and the Windows version of Roblox 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 take you through how you can configure filebeat-elasticsearch authentication. You realize that when you enable Elastic basic authentication, you need to valid user credentials to authenticate and validate access to restricted Elastic resources.
If you already have a NextClouud server and now want to sync your files using Linux; then here are the steps to install the NextCloud sync client app on Rocky Linux 8 or Almalinux 8 using the command terminal.
Just like Google Drive or Dropbox, NextCloud also offers a dedicated app for both Pc and smartphones; to offer an easy way to manage and sync files. The app has a pretty nice interface, easy to use and operate. It offers the possibility to synchronize local files with the Nextcloud server. The easiest way to do this is using the client program available for Windows, macOS Linux, Android, iOS, or via the WebDAV protocol. By using Nextcloud-client, nothing changes for you in your daily work, since all files are still on your PC or the local data server as usual. If you are working from a location or with a device where your files are not available locally, you can access the files via a website. So you always have the access to your important on your own hardware without the interface of any third party.
Streama is an open-source application that is free to use. In a Linux distribution, you can freely set up your own streaming media server and stream videos, movies, tv shows, or any others as per your wish. You can save such media files on your local computer or any other server, VPS. Such videos can be streamed from any device on your network or can be watched from anywhere if you have set up on VPS.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install TimescaleDB on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, TimescaleDB is a free, open-source, powerful database system powered by PostgreSQL. It is an extension of PostgreSQL and is specially designed to analyze time-series data with PostgreSQL. TimescaleDB offers the best of both NoSQL and relational database systems.
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 TimescaleDB on Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal Fossa). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 18.04, 16.04, and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint.
The Linux make command is used for building and compiling applications from source code, as it also builds and compiles dependencies of the source code with the help of a "makefile."
As a Linux user, you may compile utilities and install them from the command line using the make program. However, sometimes users get the error message "make: command not found." in return.
In this article, you will learn what causes this error and how you can solve it using different methods.
Step by step tutorial to install NextCloud on AlmaLinux 8 for personal cloud storage to store media files and documents using the internet from anywhere; using smartphone or desktop app.
What is Nextcloud?
Nextcloud is free and open-source server-client architecture software that source code is available on GitHub. It is a fork of another popular personal cloud solution “OwnCloud”. Any user or enterprise can use it to build their cloud similar to Google Drive, iCloud, Dropbox, and Onedrive. Where to sync and access data (upload and download) automatically with a local directory user can use Next Cloud client application for smartphones and Desktops. This means that a consistent database can be accessed from several computers, but also via a web interface. Although Nextcloud is based on PHP, only Linux is supported as a server environment. It is also not possible to use Apache or NGINX with PHP on Windows.
Wireshark is a Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) and it is developed by a community of enthusiastic developers. Wireshark (Formerly Ethereal) is used for capturing and investigating the traffic on a network. With Wireshark one can see what is going on their network: You can see from where the traffic is coming in and where it is going to. If you are working in a production environment, you are going to get a lot of traffic. It will be very cumbersome to inspect this traffic without the knowledge of Wiresharks’s filter functionalities. Using the filters you can see exactly the type of traffic you want and everything else will be removed from the scene.
Podman is a useful tool for deploying and managing containers. In part one of this article series, I covered how to deploy Podman containers and defined the environment I'll use in the rest of the series. In part two, I demonstrated several ways to list running containers and format their output. Read the previous parts first to understand the environment and necessary toolkit.
This article shows how to use Podman to extract information about the container's external Internet Protocol (IP) addresses.
This tutorial will explain how you can create online forms using CryptPad, a Google Forms alternative from France that respects software freedom and privacy. The forms are beautiful, easy to use, and also suitable for making surveys, registrations, quizzes, polls etc. for education as well as business purposes. Now let's start it.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install REMI Repository on CentOS, Rocky Linux, and AlmaLinux. For those of you who didn’t know, For those of you who didn’t know, REMI is a free-to-use repository created and maintained by a Remi Collect. The REMI repository’s main goal is to provide the latest versions of the PHP/MySQL stack on Enterprise Linux such as Fedora, Centos, Rocky Linux, and AlmaLinux.
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 REMI Repository on CentOS, Rocky Linux, and AlmaLinux.
This guide explains how to mount Dropbox locally using Rclone cloud sync tool and how to copy or backup files to Dropbox using Rclone in Linux operating systems.
I assume you already have installed Rclone on your Linux machine. If not, refer the following link to know how to install Rclone.
Samba is a suite of open source applications that implements the Server Message Block (SMB) protocol. Many operating systems, including Microsoft Windows, use the SMB protocol for client-server networking. Samba enables Linux / Unix machines to communicate with Windows machines in a network. Samba provides file and print services for various Microsoft Windows clients and can integrate with a Microsoft Windows Server domain, either as a Domain Controller (DC) or as a domain member.
Sharing files is an essential part of server administration. It allows sharing of resources across the network which are needed by users to carry out their tasks. Samba server is usually installed on central Linux server where information is stored in variety of media and accessed using windows client or Linux using Samba client.
In this article, we will be learning how to install and configure samba file sharing on Ubuntu 20.04. Ubuntu 20.04 will be configured as the Samba server then we can access the files with either Windows or Linux clients.
NFS (Network File System) is a distributed file system protocol that allows a user on a client computer to access files over a computer network much like local storage is accessed. It is a popular, cross-platform and distributed file system protocol used to export local file systems over the network so that clients can share directories and files with others over a network and interact with them as though they are mounted locally. This distributed file system protocol allows a user on a client computer to access files over a network in the same way they would access a local storage file. Because it is an open standard, anyone can implement the protocol.
Ubuntu 20.04 supports NFS version 3(NFSv3) and 4(NFSv4). The default NFS version is 4.2 which features support for Access Control Lists (ACLs), server-side copy, sparse files, space reservation, labeled NFS, layout enhancements, and much more.
In this guide, we will learn how to install and configure the NFS Server and NFS client on Ubuntu 20.04.
Step by step tutorial to install NextCloud on Rocky Linux 8 for personal cloud storage to store media files and documents using the internet from anywhere; using smartphone or desktop app.
SSH is an essential tool for login into the FreeBSD Unix box. Without SSH, you cannot manage a remote server easily. Furthermore, SSH means secure shell, and it is a replacement for insecure protocols such as telnet. This page explains how to configure and set up ssh key-based password-less authentication on a FreeBSD server or workstation.
As an administrator, you need to delete the MFA device (yes even if says not assigned) using AWS CLI. The performer needs to have IAM permission iam:DeleteVirtualMFADevice on to the given resource to update the IAM user’s MFA.
In this tutorial, we are going to learn how to install and configure QEMU 6 on Ubuntu 21.10.
QEMU is a free and open-source hypervisor, it emulates the machine’s processor through dynamic binary translation and provides a set of different hardware and device models for the machine, enabling it to run a variety of guest operating systems.
QEMU is capable of emulating a complete machine in software without the need for hardware virtualization support. It is also capable of providing userspace API virtualization for Linux and BSD kernel services. It is commonly invoked indirectly via libvirt library when using open source applications such as oVirt, OpenStack, and virt-manager.
Mattermost is a free, open-source, and secure platform for communication, collaboration, and workflow orchestration across tools and teams. It is a self-hosted chat service designed for organizations and companies to implement an internal chat service. It offers several useful features including one-to-one messaging, unlimited search history, file sharing, two-factor authentication, notifications, and more. If you are looking for an alternate solution for Slack then Mattermost is the best choice for you.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Mattermost with Nginx on Alma Linux 8.
The sleep command is useful for delaying a script for a specified amount of time. In Linux or Unix-like operating systems, most programmers use the sleep command when they need to stop the execution of a particular command or bash script after the specified number of intervals.
By default, it takes intervals in seconds but, we can also use the small suffix such as seconds (s), minutes (h), days (d) that will further convert into other formats. The delay amount with the sleep command is specified by a number.
In this article, we’ll demonstrate how to use the Linux sleep command on our system with the help of various examples.
It has been a while since we talked about how to build snaps. In the past, we went through a number of detailed examples, focused on different programming languages and the use of various useful components that can be declared in snapcraft.yaml, like extensions, stage packages, layouts, and more. Today, we want to give you an overview of a fairly complex snap, which should help you get underway in your snap journey. We will take a look at GIMP, a snap maintained under the Snapcrafters umbrella.
Good news for the Steam Deck. IO Interactive have finally put HITMAN 3 on Steam, after the Epic exclusive period has finished and it works out of the box on Linux with Steam Play Proton. Note: personal purchase.
Concluding the Agent 47 saga, the Steam release of course had its own drama to deal with. While it has been out for a year already on the Epic Store (which doesn't support Linux at all), it arrived on Steam at full price which has rubbed a lot of people the wrong way. Add to that the thoroughly confusing and long list of packages for HITMAN 3, plus Humble Store being required to separate between Epic / Steam (with the Epic version at 50% off but Steam is not) - the result added together was not a good one for IO.
The need for speed. It’s kind of hard to believe this series dates back almost 30 years ago. Even before the series came into existence for the 3DO in late 1994, EA had bought the company responsible for it, Distinctive Software, in 1991. Still, despite the criticism we tend to give EA for their greedy practices, there’s a gem from them that I hold dear to my heart: Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit.
Maybe you’re fed up with the cops. You understand that their job is to ensure the peace of the county that they’re in, but perhaps you don’t trust them, or you find them cold, rude. Or you’re left scratching your head as to why you got pulled over for having a “dim license plate light” when in reality there’s nothing wrong with either you or your car, and now you’re late for work.
Now let’s flip it the other way around: perhaps you’re a cop yourself (or you used to be one). You feel like no one appreciates the hard, risky work that you put forth in maintaining order. You’re tired of the nasty people you have to put up with when you pull them over.
One of the most interesting games last year — and not without its own share of controversies — seems to be regarded from many as a worthy alternative, if not an outright substitute, for the disappointment that Cyberpunk 2077 was. In a similar setting but with Aliens, an “indentured” — an indebted individual forced to work for a big corporation — arrives on Planet Veles, and suddenly afterwards the corporation, The Ascent Group, goes bankrupt and all Hell goes loose. You have to investigate and find your way on this big metropolis, and defend yourself in the struggles for power happening in the aftermath. Comparing this to the CD Projekt game might seem absurd from the start, because although it is an Action RPG, it uses a completely different visual approach — not first-person like Cyberpunk, not even third-person like, say, Spiders Studio The Technomancer, but in a bird’s eye view, which is sometimes called “isometric” (technically, it’s not, but the term caught on), like Diablo, Titan Quest or Path of Exile.
Sauerbraten is a free multiplayer and singleplayer first person shooter that is the successor of the old Cube FPS. Much like the original Cube, the aim of this game is fun, old school deathmatch gameplay and also to allow map/geometry editing to be done cooperatively in-game.
The annual game developer survey from GDC is out now for 2022 and it has some interesting insights as usual. That includes thoughts on the upcoming Steam Deck, with it clearly not selling everyone.
Having a little browse through it today and here's a few things to stuck out to me. For starters, of the ~2,700 developers surveyed about 7% said they are currently developing for Linux. Interestingly, 8% said their next project would be developed for Linux. When it comes to what platform developers are most interested in, Linux sat at 7%. As expected all three of those saw "PC" as the top platform, which by that they of course mean specifically Windows.
Stadia, Google's once promising cloud gaming solution doesn't seem to be really getting any love with it seeing 3-5% in those same questions. Streaming just doesn't seem all that popular with developers, with even Xbox Project xCloud (now just called Xbox Cloud Gaming) also seeing pretty low percentage interest from developers.
Browser-based gaming is here to stay though, as according to the survey it seems 9-11% of developers are currently doing it or planning to do it.
The Steam Deck's final hardware has been spotted in both official--and non-official channels. This is the real, honest-to-goodness retail design and not a developer console. The Deck's about to ship, ladies and gentleman! In other news, the Steam Deck's shipping cost is included in the price listed on the preorder page.
There are many game design programs and many different possible approaches to game design, but for me, the one that stands out is Bitsy. Created by Adam Le Doux in 2017 and released under an MIT license, Bitsy is, in the words of its creator: "A little editor for little games or worlds. The goal is to make it easy to make games where you can walk around, talk to people, and be somewhere."
XanMod is a free, open-source general-purpose Linux Kernel alternative to the stock kernel with elementary OS. It features custom settings and new features and is built to provide a responsive and smooth desktop experience, especially for new hardware.
XanMod is popular amongst Linux Gaming, streaming, and ultra-low latency requirements and often boasts the latest Linux Kernels before landing on most distributions. Most desktop users are not even into gaming but want a new kernel for better hardware support, making XanMod one of the more popular choices.
Installing a third-party kernel may be for you for users seeking to have their system kernel up to date and not wanting to install kernels or use the testing/unstable repositories manually.
In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install the latest XanMod Kernel on elementary OS 6.xx.
Ubuntu Budgie is one of several Ubuntu “flavors,” and distinguishes itself from Ubuntu proper by using the Budgie desktop environment, and incorporating lightweight applets that extend functionality and features.
Helpful, Out Of The Box
It’s an elegant Linux distribution making a concerted effort to be as user-friendly as possible. This begins with an attractive Welcome app that appears after the OS is installed. “Budgie Welcome” aggregates a treasure trove of information, settings and software that are incredibly helpful to have at first-run.
Whether you want to update your GPU driver, select a default browser, customize your desktop theme, configure backups, add extra functionality, learn keyboard shortcuts, or get involved with the community, the options are there and they’re smartly organized.
The development work for System76’s exciting new Rust-based COSMIC desktop is now underway.
While we already tried it out using the early code available, we get to see more of it now. Thanks to some prototypes available in its GitHub repository and a Figma document, we get to see more of it!
Notably, we get to see the top panel and the system tray as you would expect in the COSMIC desktop.
Currently KRunner does not provide any usage information itself, there is only an bit of documentation on the user base wiki. Back in the KDE4 days KRunner had help button, but fundamental changes in the architecture meant that the code could not simply be ported to the current version.
Since the help system required reimplementation, it was decided to implement it as a plugin for KRunner's powerful plugin infrastructure. This plugin produces results when one types ? or help. To make this more discoverable a button is added, which puts the text ? in the search field.
Linuxfx version 11.1 has been released. Linuxfx is a Brazilian Linux distribution. Linuxfx is based on Ubuntu loaded with an intuitive Cinnamon desktop user interface. Linuxfx natively brings the Edge browser, Teams, Skype, PowerShell, Office Online, Code, and more. Linuxfx lets you run Android games and apps. Linuxfx personal assistant uses Google assistant technology to help you hear and execute your voice commands quickly and efficiently.
EndeavourOS founder Bryan Poerwo announced today that there’s a new version of the EndeavourOS ARM installation script that lets you install the Arch Linux-based distribution on several SBCs, which now offers a 64-bit installation option for Raspberry Pi 4 models.
This is possible thanks to the use of the 64-bit kernel from the official Raspberry Pi OS developed by the Raspberry Pi Foundation. The 64-bit installation option is available alongside the 32-bit installation option and adds support for USB storage devices and the Linux 5.15 kernel series.
openSUSE Tumbleweed had a variety of package updates in smaller snapshots throughout this week.
A few things being prepared for Tumbleweed is that the Linux Kernel 5.16.1 was scheduled for check in and pre-integration tests for GNU Compiler Collection 12 have been started; the rolling release anticipates a merge of GCC 12 in mid-Spring.
The latest Tumbleweed snapshot, 20220117, updated Italian translations for libstorage-ng 4.4.75 and added python-rpm-macros for building the package. Haskell support was dropped in the thrift 0.15.0 package, which is a scalable cross-language service framework for Remote Procedure Call and Inter-Process Communication. No changelogs were provided for the plugins package written in Rust called gstreamer-plugins-rs. The remaining packages in the snapshot were all Python Package Index updates. Among the key PyPI packages to point out is the major version update of python-unicodedata2 14.0.0, which dropped support for End of Life Python 2.7 and 3.5 and added support for Python 3.9, 3.10 and PyPy3. A Tumbleweed arm 20220118 snapshot was release updating the same package listed above.
Dear Tumbleweed users and hackers,
7 days have passed since my last review – and as many snapshots have been released since then too. And this even includes my error of one day performing the check-in ‘slightly too late’ (i.e. past midnight). That’s the reason that 0119 did not exist. The check-in was too late and it was already January 20th by then. The snapshots released were numbered 0113, 0114, 0115, 0116, 0117, 0118, and 0120.
SUSE has released Liberty Linux, which joins the ranks of Rocky Linux and AlmaLinux as a replacement for the discontinued CentOS Linux.
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.
One of Andrew Block’s favorite things about Red Hat? Being able to contribute back to the open source community. He says, "As long as you are innovating and making yourself better, let’s go ahead and work better together."
Block is among the first Distinguished Architects at Red Hat. Distinguished Architects are senior-level technical contributors who've continued to advance in their careers working directly with customers and applying experience and knowledge of Red Hat technologies.
We had a chance to chat with Block about his experience working with Red Hat customers and the innovation that architects can help bring to their organizations.
As you sit in a meeting room (virtual or in-person), take a moment to think through the perspectives, experiences and insights of those around you being brought to that meeting.
We did just that and quickly realized the wealth of knowledge from our colleagues at the table from around the world, who were former financial services leaders. Our "bankers," as we call them, have a broad and deep understanding of financial services because they’ve experienced it first-hand.
We did eight releases of Mock.
We moved Mock’s wiki to GitHub Pages to allow indexing by search engines https://rpm-software-management.github.io/mock/ and created a Fedora-based Jekyll container for local documentation testing (https://github.com/praiskup/jekyll-github-pages-fedora-container).
The kernel team is working on final integration for kernel 5.16. This version was just recently released, and will arrive soon in Fedora. As a result, the Fedora kernel and QA teams have organized a test week from Sunday, January 23, 2022 through Sunday, January 29, 2022. Refer to the wiki page for links to the test images you’ll need to participate. Read below for details.
Blockchains first came to light in 2008 as the architecture underpinning bitcoin, the best known and most widely held cryptocurrency. It’s a truly brilliant architecture built on decades-old fundamental research in cryptography, distributed data, game theory and other advanced technologies. The blockchain’s original vision was limited to enabling bitcoin users to transact directly with each other with no need for a financial institution or government agency to certify the validity of the transactions. But, like the Internet and other transformative technologies, blockchain has now transcended its original objectives.
Blockchains are a kind of distributed ledger technologies (DLT), which also include non-blockchain DLTs. Over the past decade, an increasing number of people, including me, consider blockchains and DLTs as major next steps in the evolution of the Internet. In 2016 the World Economic Forum (WEF) named The Blockchain in its annual list of Top Ten Emerging Technologies citing its potential to fundamentally change the way markets and governments work. “Like the Internet, the blockchain is an open, global infrastructure upon which other technologies and applications can be built,” said the WEF. “And like the Internet, it allows people to bypass traditional intermediaries in their dealings with each other, thereby lowering or even eliminating transaction costs.”
Flathub and Flatpak packages are the future of Linux apps according to more people and GNOME are continuing to invest in it. They have some big plans to improve it too.
Writing in a new blog post on the GNOME Foundation website, they went over a number of things and not just Flathub related but that's what we're going to focus on for this article. The plans actually sounds pretty good!
Firstly, Flathub is going to gain a way to process and verify apps from first-party teams. As in, developers who directly publish their app and manage the Flatpak package process for Flathub. A way to actually properly distinguish official apps from community builds will be quite important for so many reasons (security, privacy and so on). Not only that but GNOME want to give developers a way to collect donations and subscriptions too, which is also important to help make it more sustainable. Sounds like it's possible a way will be added for developers to share some of the revenue with Flathub too, ensuring it too is sustainable.
Ubuntu MATE 21.10 was released on October 14th, 2021, for 64-bit computers as part of the Ubuntu 21.10 (Impish Indri) release. It comes with the latest MATE 1.26 desktop environment with support for guest sessions, as well as the RedShift app pre-installed for adjusting the color temperature of your screen.
After several months of hard work, Martin Wimpress finally managed to release Ubuntu MATE 21.10 for owners of the GPD Pocket 3 computer, an 8-inch mini-laptop with 2-in-1 design, making most of the device’s hardware work flawlessly, and also adding some specific functionality.
In what has become something of a tradition, the Ubuntu MATE team have released images for the GPD Pocket 3 modular handheld PC. Many thanks to the team at GPD for providing sample hardware for us to work with!
As of January 20, 2022, Ubuntu 21.04 is no longer supported. No more package updates will be accepted to 21.04, and it will be archived to old-releases.ubuntu.com in the coming weeks.
The original End of Life warning follows, with upgrade instructions:
Ubuntu announced its 21.04 (Hirsute Hippo) release almost 9 months ago, on April 22, 2021, and its support period is now nearing its end. Ubuntu 21.04 will reach end of life on January 20, 2022.
At that time, Ubuntu Security Notices will no longer include information or updated packages for Ubuntu 21.04.
Shenzhen Xunlong unveiled a $55 to $70 “Orange Pi 4 LTS” variant of the Orange Pi 4 SBC with the same RK3399 but a new 3G RAM option, 26- vs. 40-pin GPIO, and different WiFi, GbE, and audio chips.
The only new Orange Pi SBC Shenzhen Xunlong released last year was the Allwinner H6 based Orange Pi 3 LTS, which appears to have replaced the Orange Pi 3. Now, the company has released some detail views for an LTS version of the similarly configured, but RK3399-based Orange Pi 4. The Orange Pi 4 LTS will launch in mid-February at $55 to $70.
The LTS model appears to replace the original, which we removed from our recent 2022 SBC roundup due to lack of availability. Pricing appears to be similar, which considering that almost all the boards in our roundup rose significantly in price in 2021, can be considered a bargain.
BrainChip has announced the availability of the Akida AKD1000 (mini) PCIe boards based on the company’s neuromorphic processor of the same name and relying on spiking neural networks (SNN) which to deliver real-time inference in a way that is much more efficient than “traditional” AI chips based on CNN (convolutional neural network) technology.
The mini PCIe card was previously found in development kits based on Raspberry Pi or an Intel (x86) mini PC to let partners, large enterprises, and OEMs evaluate the Akida AKD1000 chip. The news is today is simply that the card can easily be purchased in single units or quantities for integration into third-party products.
BrainChip has launched a $499 “Akida AKD1000 Mini PCIe Board” equipped with its neuromorphic, event-based Akida neural networking chip for edge AI. The kit comes with BOM and design layout files.
In October, BrainChip Holdings launched two Akida Development Kits that combine a mini-PCIe board equipped with its Akida AI accelerator along with a Raspberry Pi 4 or Comet Lake-S based Shuttle PC. The company has now followed up with a version of the mini-PCIe implementation as a standalone product called the Akida AKD1000 Mini PCIe Board. To assist system integrators, BrainChip is providing the $499 board with full PCIe design layout files and the bill of materials (BOM) “to enable them to build their own boards and implement AKD1000 chips in volume as a stand-alone embedded accelerator or as a co-processor.”
The linux-firmware package 20220119.0c6a7b3-2 implements kernel firmware compression. Linux kernel from 5.3 on support loading from xz compressed firmware. CONFIG_FW_LOADER_COMPRESS kernel option must be enabled. All official Arch Linux kernel support this for a long time.
SiFive's HiFive Unmatched is the best, readily available RISC-V developer board at the moment with enough horsepower for modest development/porting work and continues seeing improvements with the mainline Linux kernel. But availability on HiFive Unmatched is beginning to dry up and SiFive isn't planning on any further production runs as it begins focusing on the board's successor.
The HiFive Unmatched has been a nice RISC-V developer board with SiFive's Freedom U740 SoC, 16GB of DDR4 memory, microSD and M.2 NVMe SSD storage support, one PCIe x16 slot, and Gigabit Ethernet. But it's becoming more difficult to find with today's supply chain issues and now SiFive focusing instead on their to-be-announced 2022 developer platform.
Mozilla released Firefox 96.0.2 to the Stable channel on January 20, 2022. The new version of the browser fixes three issues that affect Facebook, LastPass and audio play on Linux.
Firefox 96.0.2 is already available. Firefox is configured to download and install updates automatically, but users may speed up the process by selecting Menu > Help > About Firefox. The window that opens displays the current version of the browser. A check is run to find out if an update is available; if that is the case, it is downloaded and installed automatically on the system.
The official release notes list three fixes...
A couple months ago, on a lark, I came up with a list of obscure image formats, most of which were not particularly known outside of specialist circles or by collectors. But the post was successful, and as a result, some of those specialists got upset with me about some of my choices. Now, if I were a normal person, I would cut my losses and say, well, maybe I shouldn’t tempt fate again and let angry bloggers or developers question my choices. But I’m not a normal person, so I’m going to list off a bunch of audio formats that have fallen into the path of obscurity, but someone is bound to inevitably love, destroying my thesis. (Seriously, though, that last post led me to create parameters around what I define as “obscure” in this context. Those parameters are located here.) Today’s Tedium dives into audio file formats that time forgot, except for that one guy who is ready to defend WMA to the death.
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While RealNetworks’ tie to MusicNet also had DRM baked in, Microsoft tended to have the leverage thanks to its ownership of Windows, and WMA was used in numerous successors to its early DRM music store Pressplay, including Napster and the Zune Music Store.
But as the music industry moved away from DRM-laden music stores and towards audio files reliant on open standards, WMA’s value proposition began to fade; at one point, Microsoft even released a version of Windows 10 that actually disabled the DRM’ed files from being played anymore. If that doesn’t describe an “audio file format that didn’t make it,” I can’t tell you what does.
While wireless communications are unquestionably useful in projects, common wireless protocols such as WiFi and Bluetooth peter out after only a number of meters, which is annoying when your project is installed in the middle of nowhere. Moving to an LTE-based or similar mobile solution can help with the range, but this does not help when there’s poor cell coverage, and it tends to use more power. Fortunately, for low-bitrate, low-power wide-area networks (LPWAN) like e.g. sensor networks, there’s a common solution in the form of LoRaWAN, as in long-range wide area network (WAN).
The proprietary LoRa RF modulation technique that underlies LoRaWAN is based on Chirp Spread Spectrum (CSS). This modulation technique is highly resistant to channel noise and fading as well as Doppler shift, enabling it to transmit using relatively low power for long distances. LoRaWAN builds on top of the physical layer provided by LoRa to then create the protocol that devices can then use to communicate with other LoRa devices.
Courtesy of global LoRaWAN gateway and software providers such as The Things Industries and ThingSpeak, it’s possible even as a hobbyist to set up a LoRaWAN-powered sensor network with minimal cost. Let’s take take a look at exactly what is involved in setting up LoRaWAN devices, and what possible alternatives to LoRaWAN might be considered.
When we write about drone stories from the United Kingdom, they often have a slightly depressing air to them as we relate tales of unverified air proximity reports closing airports or bungled official investigations that would make the Keystone Kops look like competent professionals.
A serious problem has been announced in Windows Server 2019 and Windows 10, with some versions vulnerable in their default configurations. The problem is in how Windows handles HTTP Trailer packets, which contain extra information at the end of normal HTTP transfers. There is a PoC available that demonstrates a crash. It appears that an additional information leak vulnerability would have to be combined with this one to produce a true exploit. This seems to be a different take on CVE-2021-31166, essentially exploiting the same weakness, and working around the incomplete fix. This issue was fixed in the January patch set for Windows, so make sure you’re covered.
CISA has added four new vulnerabilities to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities Catalog, based on evidence that threat actors are actively exploiting the vulnerabilities listed in the table below. These types of vulnerabilities are a frequent attack vector for malicious cyber actors of all types and pose significant risk to the federal enterprise.
McAfee has released McAfee Agent for Windows version 5.7.5, which addresses vulnerabilities CVE-2021-31854 and CVE-2022-0166. An attacker could exploit these vulnerabilities to take control of an affected system.
In this one, there's a heap overflow bug in the legacy_parse_param in the Linux kernel's fs/fs_context.c program. This parameter is used in Linux filesystems during superblock creation for mount and superblock reconfiguration for a remount. The superblock records all of a filesystem's characteristics such as file size, block size, empty and filled storage blocks. So, yeah, it's important.
The legacy_parse_param() "PAGE_SIZE - 2 - size" calculation was mistakenly made an unsigned type. This means a large value of "size" results in a high positive value instead of a negative value as expected. Whoops.
This, in turn, meant you copy data beyond the memory slab allocated for it. And, as all programmers know, writing beyond the memory your program is supposed to have access to is a terrible thing.
Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a major flaw in one of Linux’s most popular distros - Ubuntu, and are urging all users to patch immediately.
As reported on Ubuntu’s website, two researchers - William Luil and Jamila Hill-Daniel - discovered a vulnerability that allows malicious actors to crash the system, or run software in administrator mode.
The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2022-0185, allegedly affects all of the Ubuntu releases that are still being supported. That includes Ubuntu 21.10 Impish Indri with Linux kernel 5.13, Ubuntu 21.04 Hirsute Hippo with Linux kernel 5.11, Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Focal Fossa, and Ubuntu 18.04 LTS Bionic Beaver, both with Linux kernel 5.4 LTS.
Red Hat and Ubuntu have issued warnings about a serious vulnerability in their Linux distributions.
It’s described as a heap-based buffer overflow flaw (CVE 2022-0185). According to Ubuntu, the file system context functionality in the Linux kernel contained an integer underflow vulnerability, leading to an out-of-bounds write. A local attacker could use this to cause a denial of service (system crash) or execute arbitrary code.
As The Register notes, the discovery also comes as Ubuntu 21.04 reached end of life, so rather than apply Ubutu’s mitigation to servers running this version, Linux admins should upgrade them to version 21.10, and apply a patch to it.
Earlier this week the Linux Vendor Firmware Service began surging with activity following many new system firmware files being uploaded for what appears to be a "high severity upcoming security issue" but currently undisclosed. That issue hasn't been made public yet, but after poking around it is updating the Intel CPU microcode.
After that earlier article, Red Hat's Richard Hughes who is the lead LVFS/fwupd lead developer commented that they shipped more than 156,000 firmware updates to end-users in a single day. The day after they were still at around twice their usual volume. For hardware with LVFS support for firmware updates, it's been a busy week but that only covers a small portion of the hardware out there.
Security updates have been issued by Debian (aide, flatpak, kernel, libspf2, and usbview), Fedora (kernel, libreswan, nodejs, texlive-base, and wireshark), openSUSE (aide, cryptsetup, grafana, permissions, rust1.56, and stb), SUSE (aide, apache2, cryptsetup, grafana, permissions, rust1.56, and webkit2gtk3), and Ubuntu (aide, thunderbird, and usbview).
Anybody who upgraded to the recent Rust 1.58.0 release will probably want to move on to Rust 1.58.1; among other things it contains a fix for a security vulnerability in the standard library. "We recommend all users to update their toolchain immediately and rebuild their programs with the updated compiler".
The diffoscope maintainers are pleased to announce the release of diffoscope version 201. This version includes the following changes:
[ Chris Lamb ] * If the debian.deb822 module raises any exception on import, re-raise it as an ImportError instead. This should fix diffoscope on some Fedora systems. Thanks to Mattia Rizzolo for suggesting this particular solution. (Closes: reproducible-builds/diffoscope#300)
[ Zbigniew JÃâ¢drzejewski-Szmek ] * Fix json detection with file-5.41-3.fc36.x86_64.
