We had another great week in the world of Linux releases with KaOS 2022.02, Bluestar Linux 5.16.10, and Kali Linux 2022.1.
Sadly, my recording setup is still packed away, so I couldn't make any videos yet.
I share my 4 new brushes for speedpainting in Krita 5, and a new video! The video contains links, install, usage and 4 timelapses.
So we talked to Luke Short back around the end of December 2021, and while it’s a little delayed, we finally get to publish that conversation as a podcast. Luke Short has been very active in tracking the likely Steam integration into ChromeOS and while it has not officially happened yet, the tech stack is in place to make it possible. In this podcast we discuss:
Are you struggling with switching from Windows or Mac to Linux. Some of our responses to emails this month might just help you out! Also, our listeners help with contact apps, brightness control for your monitor and more. We also discuss Thunderbird, and how to make a Windows display clearer.
**Bluez-Qt** and **Calligra Words**.
Every time I mention Asahi Linux someone complains about it asks what even is the point of Asahi Linux why would anyone ever want to run Linux on a M1 Silicon Mac, well why not.
We all know the drill by now. Another week, another rc.
Things continue to look pretty much normal. There are fixes all over the place, but no more than usual for this time of the release. And the statistics look normal too, with most of the changes being to drivers. The diffstat looks a bit unusual with the Intel iwlwifi driver showing a lot of modification, but it's almost entirely due to removal of the deprecated broadcast filtering that doesn't even work with newer firmware.
Outside the driver subsystems, it's mostly arch updates (kvm shows up a lot again), tooling and networking.
And various random changes elsewhere. The appended shortlog gives more details for the people who are interested in the minutiae.
Please do test.
Linus
The 5.17-rc5 kernel prepatch is out for testing. "Things continue to look pretty much normal. There are fixes all over the place, but no more than usual for this time of the release".
Linux programmers fixed bugs faster than anyone — in an average of just 25 days (improving from 32 days in 2019 to just 15 in 2021). That's the conclusion of Google's "Project Zero" security research team, which studied the speed of bug-fixing from January 2019 to December 2021.
Corel Corporation is a Canadian software company specializing in graphics processing. They are best known for developing CorelDRAW, a vector graphics editor. They are also notable for purchasing and developing AfterShot Pro, PaintShop Pro, Painter, Video Studio, MindManager, and WordPerfect.
Corel has dabbled with Linux over the years. For example they produced Corel Linux, a Debian-based distribution which bundled Corel WordPerfect Office for Linux. While Corel effectively abandoned its Linux business in 2001 they are not completely Linux-phobic. For example, AfterShot Pro has an up to date Linux version albeit its proprietary software.
This series looks at the best free and open source alternatives to products offered by Corel.
PeaZip is an open source file and archive manager. It's freeware and free of charge for any use. PeaZip can extract most of archive formats both from Windows and Unix worlds, ranging from mainstream 7Z, RAR, TAR and ZIP to experimental ones like PAQ/LPAQ family, currently the most powerful compressor available.
Open and extract 200+ archive formats: 001, 7Z, ACE(*), ARC, ARJ, BZ2, CAB, DMG, GZ, ISO, LHA, PAQ, PEA, RAR, TAR, UDF, WIM, XZ, ZIP ZIPX - view full list of supported archive file formats for archiving and for extraction.
With our devices becoming more and more connected to the world and with the increasing number of files to keep stored and accessible from outside the home, cloud services have provided space to store data for free, but with limited space and with increasing questions about securiy and privacy. OwnCloud and Raspberry PI can give you a new and cheap solution to assure privacy for your data and get a cloud with a huge space for your files.
In this tutorial, I’m going to show you how to install OwnCloud in Raspberry PI with Docker.
In this guide, we will talk about how to clear RAM memory cache and issues which occur in the Linux and if you want to clear the RAM Memory cache and free some memory in Linux, there are many commands for this process.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Magento on Fedora 35. For those of you who didn’t know, Magento is an open-source e-commerce platform written in PHP that uses multiple PHP frameworks. Magento provides e-commerce merchants a shopping cart system, and control over the look, feel, and functionality of their site. Magento also offers marketing, SEO (search engine optimization), and catalog-management tools to site administrators. The Magento 2 is the latest release available. This version has a number of improvement changes and optimizations over the previous Magento version.
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 Magento eCommerce Marketing Platform on a Fedora 35.
If you're an Android user, you probably use Google Messages to send and receive text messages on your device. But did you know you can also access Messages from your computer and chat with your contacts while sitting at your desk?
Well, it's possible to do so, thanks to the device pairing feature on Messages. If you're wondering how to get it on your Linux desktop, it's possible using Google Messages for Desktop and Messages for Web.
Let's take a look at using both of these methods to get Messages on your Linux desktop.
This article will show you how to check the network speed, disk performance, and CPU performance of your Linux VPS server for a quick benchmark.
When it comes to choosing the right VPS (Virtual Private Server) server for your solution, you may want to test its performance. The most important factors to consider when purchasing a VPS are Internet connection speed, disk I/O speed, and CPU performance.
Of course, the cost of the service is also important, but competition among providers means cheap VPS servers are easily available.
Today we are looking at how to install MetaTrader 4 with the EXNESS Broker on a Chromebook with Crossover 21. 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.
PKCS#11 is one of the popular platform-independent standard for accessing cryptographic tokens. Such tokens is widely used for various purpose in everyday life, for example USB token for your online banking or authenticating to VPN. Comparing with GPG compatible cards or tokens, PKCS#11 tokens do not have direct support by GPG, but they has a great benefit of being able to store several keys.
To use PKCS#11 tokens with GPG, we’ll need to setup a gpg-agent with gnupg-pkcs11-scd. In this article, I’m using a CanoKey Pigeon with opensc-pkcs11.so library from OpenSC. If you use other secure token for storing your certificate, you should consult your token provider for the library. And I assume you already have certificates on your token.
Note: This does not cover using PKCS#11 token over GPG for ssh authentication purpose. That is overkill. If you want to use PKCS#11 token for ssh authentication, take a look at documents like this without GPG in the middle.
As of Feb, 2022, the following does not work for me with gnupg-pkcs11-scd-0.9.2-6.fc35. So I compiled gnupg-pkcs11-scd-0.10.0-1.fedorap11.fc35 myself.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install FastPanel on AlmaLinux 8. For those of you who didn’t know, Fastpanel is one of the most popular and most used panels all over the world. Fastpanel is a simple and user-friendly panel. With FastPanel you can schedule backups, install free Let’s Encrypt certificates easily, manage firewall rules via the web interface, and analyze the statistics of the server resources consumed by the server resources in real-time.
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 Fastpanel server management panel on an AlmaLinux 8. You can follow the same instructions for CentOS and Rocky Linux.
The Konsole is an advanced terminal emulator application for Linux distributions. If you’ve ever used the Manjaro KDE, you probably are already familiar with the Konsole. Because, in Manjaro KDE, the Konsole comes pre-installed as the default terminal application. In Konsole, you can do all the regular and extended tasks for making your Linux experience better and smoother.
The Konsole terminal emulator is lightweight and easy to use. Even with multiple tabs, the terminal runs smoothly on the system. The users admire it so much for its customizability, sessions, and schemes.
This is the 6th episode in a series I am writing about using Slackware as your private/personal ‘cloud server’. It is an unscheduled break-out topic to discuss an Etherpad server specifically.
[...]
Etherpad with integrated Whiteboard can be a compelling solution for some user groups. Even without Jitsi Meet, you can jointly write and draw, save your work to your local harddrive and you have voice & video in a small overlay if you need to discuss the proceedings.
Have you ever wanted to be a fly on the wall, watching a penetration tester attack a new machine — working their way through the layers of security, ultimately leveraging what they learned into a login? What tools are used, what do they reveal, and how is the information applied? Well good news, because [Phani] has documented a step-by-step of every action taken to eventually obtain root access on a machine — amusingly named DevOops — which was set up specifically for testing.
There is a whole playlist about installing the xanmod kernel on ArcoLinux.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install LibreOffice on Fedora 35. For those of you who didn’t know, LibreOffice is a free and open-source office suite, developed by The Document Foundation.
DNF is a package management command line utility on RHEL distributions like Red Hat Enterprise Linux, CentOS Stream and Fedora. Usually, DNF or Yum command is used to install, update and remove rpm packages from command line.
Apart from this, dnf can also be used to download packages locally on the system without installing. In this guide, we will learn how to download rpm packages without installing them on RHEL 8.
Note: There are some setups where we don’t have internet connectivity on RHEL systems, but we have a task to install some packages, may be from some external repository like EPEL. So, in this situation, downloading RPM packages becomes handy. We can download the packages on RHEL systems where we have internet connectivity and then will transfer those packages to remote systems.
Let’s suppose we want to download bind and bind-utils packages along with its dependencies. Login to RHEL 8 system, open the terminal and run following commands.
Flatpak is the package manager that holds required libraries and dependent packages of the application inside one bundle supported by Red Hat. The goal is to achieve a single application that runs over multiple distributions without causing any package error.
Flathub is the repository of the flatpak where you can find all the applications available to install using flatpak. Now you may hear about snapd or snap packages backed by canonical, which work the same way flatpak works.
So, the difference between them is that flatpak is supported by more distribution than the snapd out of the box. The main reason behind this canonical has been found guilty of collecting user data for a personal benefit that breaks the open-source oath.
Kate is a powerful and intuitive editor that may be the perfect fit for you. With its robust yet straightforward interface, Kate offers everything from word processing to development tools in one place – which saves time! And with 200+ languages available on-board alongside plugins galore (think code hooks), this tool will help maximize productivity, whether it’s coding or content creation.
In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install Kate Text Editor on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Focal Fossa using three installation methods.
Follow through this post to learn how to install and setup Ceph Storage cluster on Ubuntu 20.04. Ceph is a scalable distributed storage system designed for cloud infrastructure and web-scale object storage. It can also be used to provide Ceph Block Storage as well as Ceph File System storage.
With the release of modern graphics cards, it’s easy to forget that before they were standard in most gaming laptops and consoles – there was Mesa. The open-source software implementation translates API specifications into vendor-specific drivers so you can use high-end applications with your PC even if it has older hardware!
Most Linux distributions feature Mesa drivers, given they are free and open-source before any proprietary drivers options, however for most Linux distributions that focus on stability first, you may find your Mesa drivers needing an update when new releases support newer graphic card hardware and technologies.
In the following tutorial, you will learn how to upgrade or install Mesa Drivers on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS with two PPA options that support Intel, Radeon, NVIDIA ect.
I used to marvel at people who required more than one clock, each set to an exotic timezone, on the wall. I saw it mostly in movies, so when I met someone in real life with lots of clocks, it made them seem particularly important, like the leader of a global spy network or a big banking syndicate. And yet lately, I find myself needing to be aware of at least three different timezones on a regular basis. It's not that I've become more important, it's just that the world has gotten smaller, thanks to technology and remote work.
Technology conveniently also makes it easy to have clocks set to different timezones, but the trick, I've found, is to have those clocks where you need them when you need the time. The KDE Plasma Desktop has a few simple solutions for this problem.
After a few months of slow but steady progress, a new release of Portfolio is out. This new release comes with the ability to fully manage external devices, better feedback and responsiveness when copying big files to slow devices and many bugs fixes.
Today we are publishing a “release candidate” version of Getting Things GNOME 0.6. You can either try it out directly from the git master version (by running launch.sh; see the general instructions), or from the testing package available on Flathub’s “beta” repository, separately from the standard stable flathub/flatpak release you may already be running.
I expected that the 5.15.16 kernel will be OK, released on January 20. I compiled it, and yes, works great.
It is time to test another release for IPFire: IPFire 2.27 - Core Update 164. It comes with a vastly improved firewall engine, a new kernel and various security and bug fixes. Please help us testing this release and if you would like to support us, please donate.
This update brings a new kernel for IPFire which is based on Linux 5.15. It comes with a large number of bug fixes, security fixes, and hardware support improvements. It brings improved performance for cryptographic operations on aarch64 and enables virtualisation support on this architecture, too.
A great deal of IT updates have happened at Davie Street Enterprises (DSE) over the last year. The company’s digital transformation champions have all helped innovate and modernize the different aspects of their IT infrastructure. They’ve utilized the latest technology for adopting a hybrid cloud strategy that is safer, scalable, efficient, and enables modern application development practices.
DSE did this through not one but many different technology providers—an entire ecosystem of independent software vendors (ISVs) with Red Hat’s software at the center. Next-generation application development, security, AI/ML, edge, application migration, and observability were all focus areas in the company’s journey. Here’s a sampling of everything it accomplished!
There is a new application available for Sparkers: Mailspring
few days ago, I reviewed a USB 3.0 to 2.5 Gbps Ethernet adapter based on Realtek RTL8156B chip in Ubuntu 20.04, and let’s say the reliability and performance were underwhelming. I got some recommendations like changing cables, the MTU size, etc…
Playing around with cables did no help, but one comment mentioned the cdc_ncm driver could be the issue, followed by another saying that updating to Linux kernel 5.14 should install the correct r8152 driver… So I just did that...
One look at the default Winamp skin is sure to reawaken fond memories for a certain segment of the community. For those who experienced the MP3 revolution first hand, few audio players stick out in the mind like Winamp and its llama whipping reputation. No, the proprietary Windows-only media player isn’t the sort of thing you’d catch us recommending these days; but it was the 1990s, and things were very different.
For those who want to relive those heady peer-to-peer days, [Tim C] has posted a tutorial on how to turn Adafruit’s PyPortal into a touch screen MP3 player that faithfully recreates the classic Winamp look. As you can see in the video below it certainly nails the visuals, down to the slightly jerky scrolling of the green track info which we’re only now realizing was probably the developer’s attempt to mimic some kind of a physical display like a VFD.
I’ve been involved in various open source software communities since I first discovered Linux back in 1998. Back then it was Red Hat Linux, v5.1 that I first experimented with as an intriguing alternative to Microsoft Windows 95. Using Red Hat Linux quickly turned into all kinds of involvement in projects like Ubuntu, GNOME, Abiword, and various libraries that other software made use of.
I started the GNOME Journal, a now defunct monthly newsletter and community dedicated to deeper articles covering the exciting world of the GNOME desktop project. And it was from relationships made in this community that I eventually landed my dream developer role working full time on Ubuntu at Canonical.
Using and participating in open source software projects literally changed my life and set my career in motion long before I had any formal engineering education or job. I would be a different person today without these amazing free and open community projects.
Gian Demarmels and Lucien Heuzeveldt have finished their Bachelor's thesis which adds a second blind signature scheme to GNU Taler.
You also have to actually fork (not star…) GitHub repositories and download them, cause people take down that stuff, too. And you cannot rely on the Internet Archive to Wayback-machine everything. It doesn’t always work, and the crawls stop at a finite depth. Pretty famously in the type world, the Typedrawers web forum got taken offline a few years ago, erasing literally decades of industry discussion. The site owners never got around to restoring it. But even before that, they halfheartedly converted a bunch of the threads to some new CMS, which broke (a) every Wayback Machine link and (b) broke every internal URL in every thread and (c) broke every “previous page | next page” link in every Wayback link that did exist. They still have not been brought to justice.
Anyway, I digress. That minor effort works fine for digital originals. It gets a lot harder for printed sources. This is where a real database-driven tool becomes mandatory. I’ve been using Zotero, which is fine as it goes although it has plenty of pain points. It is, at least, something that you can run entirely on your own machine (although they do try to rope you into using their hosted service, which you have to pay for if you go over the comically-small limit). And, obviously, it’s FOSS and runs on Linux machines.
CopperSpice is a collection of libraries – a toolkit, if you will – for developing cross-platform applications in C++. That should sound familiar to KDE people, and it is an LGPL v2.1 fork of Qt from around 2013. In many ways, it is a purely-QWidget continuation, which modernized (C++17, CMake) much earlier than Qt itself. There are some applications that use it, but CopperSpice is rarely packaged (Arch only until today!) for use as a system library. Its consumers probably build CopperSpice locally as part of a product, and this post explains why (and what I did to make to packageable on FreeBSD).
Modular packages fixes the biggest complain of a single system Ruby package by giving you more options. Let’s see how to install different Ruby versions from modular packages in Fedora, CentOS Stream or Rocky Linux.
Although I am a fan of chruby (read my comparison of ruby-build with ruby-install), long compile times is something I dread. A lot of times, I just used system packages.
System packages are fast to install (no compilation!) and easy to maintain (free security updates!), but there was one thing that prevents most to use them: a single version in the repository. This is exactly what modular packages are trying to fix.
Since Fedora 28 times we got one extra RPM repository called Fedora Modular. It’s a repository that lets you install this modular packages and should be installed for you by default. The repository is called AppStream on RHEL, CentOS Stream, and Rocky Linux. But essentially it’s the same thing.
Hello! I was talking to some friends the other day about the types of conference talks we enjoyed.
One category we came up with was “you know this thing that used to be super hard? Turns out now it’s WAY EASIER and maybe you can do it now!“.
So I asked on Twitter about programming things that used to be hard and are now easy
Here are some of the answers I got. Not all of them are equally “easy”, but I found reading the list really fun and it gave me some ideas for things to learn. Maybe it’ll give you some ideas too.
A recent trend in open source projects seems to be to avoid releasing proper release archives (whether signed with GPG or not). Instead people add Git tags for release commits and call it a day.
A long and arduous debate could be had whether this is "wrong", "right" and whether Git hashes are equivalent to proper tarballs or not, or if --depth=1 is a good thing or not. We're not going to get into that at all.
XS has a reputation of being ugly and cumbersome, but in my experience, it doesn't have to be. Let's take for example this snippet from my Thread::Csp::Promise class:
MODULE = Thread::Csp PACKAGE = Thread::Csp::Promise PREFIX = promise_
Ham radio operators can be pretty selective about their gear. Some are old-school tube purists who would never think of touching a rig containing transistors, and others are perfectly happy with the small Software Defined Radio (SDR) hooked up to their PC. The vast majority, though, of us are somewhere in between — we appreciate the classic look and feel of vintage radios as well as the convenience of modern ones. Better yet, some of us even like to combine the two by adding a few modern bells and whistles to our favorite “boat anchor.”
There is a vibrant cottage industry built around selling accessories to improve the storage and organization of tabletop games, but the more DIY-minded will definitely appreciate [Steve Genoud]’s deckinabox tool, which can create either 3D-printable designs, or ones more suited to folded paper or cardstock. Making your own organizer can be as satisfying as it is economical, and [Steve]’s tool aims to make customization simple and easy.
Here at Hackaday, we love projects that result in useful lab equipment for a fraction of the cost of professional gear. [Lorenz], over at Advanced Tinkering, built his own instrument for Laser-Induced Breakdown Spectroscopy, or LIBS, and it’s quite an impressive device. LIBS is a technique for analyzing substances to find their chemical composition. Basically, the idea is to zap a sample with a powerful laser, then look at the little cloud of plasma that results and measure the wavelengths emitted by it.
[...]
The software also contains a database of spectra corresponding to chemical elements: once you’ve taken a spectrum of an unknown sample, you can overlay these onto the resulting plot and try to find a match. The resulting system seems to work quite well. Samples of iron oxide and silver oxide gave a reasonable match to their constituent components.
[IMSAI Guy] presents for your viewing pleasure, a nice video on the topic of optical filters and mirrors. (Video, embedded below) The first optical device is a simple absorption filter, where incoming light is absorbed in a wavelength-selective manner. Much more interesting however is the subject of interference or dichroic filters. These devices are constructed from many thin layers of a partially reflective material, and operate on the principle of interference. This means that photons hitting the filter stack will interfere either constructively or destructively giving the filter a pass or stop response for a particular wavelength.
As [IMSAI Guy] demonstrates, this makes the filters direction-specific, as photons hitting the stack at a different angle will travel slightly further. Longer travel means the interference effect will be different, and so will the filtering response. You can see this by playing around with one in your hands and seeing the color change as your rotate it. Dichroic filter films can also make for some stunning optical effects. Very cool stuff.
For those building their own remote controlled devices like RC boats and quadcopter drones, having a good transmitter-receiver setup is a significant factor in the eventual usability of their build. Many transmitters are available in the 2.4 GHz band, but some operate at different frequencies, like the 868/915 MHz band. The TBS Crossfire is one such transmitter, and it’s become a popular model thanks to its long-range performance.
Wazuh is able to detect vulnerabilities in the applications installed in agents using the Vulnerability Detector module. This software audit is performed through the integration of vulnerability feeds indexed by Canonical, Debian, Red Hat, and the National Vulnerability Database.
Wazuh can integrate with YARA in different ways. YARA is a versatile Open Source pattern-matching tool aimed to detect malware samples based on rule descriptions, although it is not limited to that use case alone.
This use case focuses on automatically executing YARA scans by using the active response module when a Wazuh FIM alert is triggered. This is an interesting way of using YARA as it concentrates the scans on new or recently modified files in your environment, thus optimizing resource consumption on the monitored endpoints.
