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Links 20/05/2022: Plasma's Latest Beta in Kubuntu 22.04, Kapow 1.6.0 Released



  • GNU/Linux

    • Desktop/Laptop

      • LTS Laptops

        I've seen many positive reviews of the Framework Laptop, and now there's a new one with a 12th gen CPU. It sounds like a worthwhile upgrade, and many commenters are looking forward to upgrade their existing, upgradable laptop.

        I wish there was something like the Framework Laptop, but with a long-term-support promise: a company that produces one laptop model, which is good enough for most people, and available for 5 years. Some single-board computers have this kind of availability guarantee, some even have an optimized OS (which becomes faster over time, by taking advantage of hardware capabilities like AArch64 and Vulkan) and some of them are good enough as desktop computers.

    • Audiocasts/Shows

      • VideoFedora 36 Released! And it is SERIOUS Competition to Ubuntu! (2022) - Invidious

        Fedora 36 is out and it is packed with fantastic new features. We get the flashy new gnome 42 with its new GTK 4 apps and stunningly gorgeous dark mode.

      • Linux Foundation's Site/BlogLinux Foundation Podcast Series: “The Untold Stories of Open Source”

        The power of a story. I first wrote about this 7 years ago in a series I titled Lessons from a Two Year Old. But it is a reality as old as time itself – humans are wired for stories. We enjoy listening to them, telling them, and they help us to relate to others and to remember things.

      • Jupiter BroadcastingRecipe for Success | Self-Hosted 71

        Alex has found the perfect tool to bring your recipe management into the future. Plus, a convenient trick for scripts with passwords, dying hard drives, and the killer new Proxmox feature.

      • VideoLinux Essentials - The dnf Command - Invidious

        There's a handful of popular package managers that are used on various Linux distributions, and dnf is among the most popular. It's the default package manager on distros such as Red Hat, CentOS, AlmaLinux, Rocky Linux, Fedora, among others.

      • VideoDBcare - How TuxCare aims to Eliminate Database Server Reboots - Invidious [Ed: Seems like veiled marketing, not organic YouTube "material"]

        DBcare is a new offering from TuxCare, which aims to help administrators avoid rebooting database servers by live-patching them. DBcare is currently in beta, and you can test it out right now. Last year, I had a chance to chat with Jim Jackson about DBcare, and we had a really good conversation about the project that's still timely today, especially considering the beta test has recently opened up.

    • Kernel Space

      • LWNLWN is now on Mastodon [Ed: Outsourcing one's readership to a volatile third party seems like short-sighted and risky a move from a site almost 30 years old]

        For readers who want to follow our article stream on Mastodon, LWN now (finally) has a presence in the Fosstodon community; you can find us at @LWN@fosstodon.org.

      • Linux Plumbers Conference: Microconferences at Linux Plumbers Conference: linux/arch

        Linux Plumbers Conference 2022 is pleased to host the linux/arch Microconference

        The linux/arch microconference aims to bring architecture maintainers in one room to discuss how the code in arch/ can be improved, consolidated and generalized.

    • Graphics Stack

      • Mike Blumenkrantz: Depth

        Two posts in one month is a record for May of 2022. Might even shoot for three at this rate.

        Yesterday I posted a hasty roundup of what’s been going on with zink.

        It was not comprehensive.

        What else have I been working on, you might ask.

    • Applications

      • Ubuntu PitTop 15 Best Download Managers for Linux in 2022

        It’s obvious to have a good download manager for Linux or other operating systems you are using. Though all modern browsers have a default download manager, it’s not good enough to handle an effective downloading system. When the question is whether a web browser can handle multiple downloads, pause system, torrent integration, or quick download, the answer is not satisfactory. A download manager is required when you go for downloading big files or multiple files. So, if you are looking for one right now, here I am going to share a generic list of the 15 best download managers for Linux or primarily focused on Ubuntu.

      • MedevelEteSync is an encrypted E2E sync and backup tools for your data

        EteSync offers a secure, end-to-end encrypted, and privacy respecting sync for your contacts, calendars, and tasks (using Tasks.org and OpenTasks). For notes, please use the EteSync Notes application.

        EteSync allows users to setup their own server, and sync their important and private data as contacts, and calendar events to their private data without having to worry about complex configuration or setup.

        [...]

        The Etebase server is released under the AGPL-3.0 License.

    • Instructionals/Technical

      • CitizixHow To Use Vagrant with Libvirt on Linux to manage VMs

        Vagrant is an open-source software product for building and maintaining portable virtual software development environments; e.g., for VirtualBox, KVM, Hyper-V, Docker containers, VMware, and AWS. It is not a stand-alone virtualization provider. It relies on other virtualization providers such as Virtualbox, Libvirt/KVM, Docker, VMWare to create and run virtual machines.

        By default, Vagrant uses Oracle VirtualBox as provider. If more than one providers are installed (E.g. Virtualbox and Libvirt) in your system, it will always start a VM with Virtualbox unless you explicitly provide a specific provider. One of the great features of Vagrant is that users are never tied to a specific virtualization platform. The users can create workflows that work with multiple virtualization providers.

        In this guide, we will learn how to use Vagrant with Libvirt KVM provider on Linux.

      • How to Install UNRAR on Fedora 35/34/33/32

        RAR files are very common on the internet, that’s why many novice users wonder how to handle them in a distribution like Fedora. That’s why we’ve prepared this post, so you can install UNRAR on Fedora.

      • Ubuntu HandbookHow to Get rid of the Invisible “gjs” window in Ubuntu 22.04 GNOME 42 | UbuntuHandbook

        Got an invisible app window called “gjs” in Ubuntu 22.04 desktop? Here’s how to kill it without log out the current session.

        GJS, stands for Gnome JavaScript, it’s part of Gnome-shell use as JavaScript programming environment. In Ubuntu, the default Desktop Icons NG (DING) extension use gjs, which could cause the issue sometimes.

      • HowTo ForgeWhat is AWS GuarDuty and how to use it
      • ID RootHow To Install Apache Solr on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS - idroot

        In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Apache Solr on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, as well as some extra required packages by Apache

      • Make Use OfHow Memory Allocation Works on Linux

        In computers, for a process to be executable, it needs to be placed in memory. For this, a field must be assigned to a process in memory. Memory allocation is an important issue to be aware of, especially in kernel and system architectures.

        Let's take a look at Linux memory allocation in detail and understand what goes on behind the scenes.

      • ByteXDHow to Convert a PNG to SVG in Inkscape - ByteXD

        PNG files are raster images, which means it is made-up of small static elements called pixels, each pixel is filled with one color, so if you zoom in enough, you can reach a point where there are no details but single-colored pixels stacked together.

        In contrast, vector elements are described by mathematical equations; therefore, results in infinite resolution, which means no matter how you zoom in, the file will not pixelate.

        PNGs are often the final product of the design process, i.e., after you create your logo or illustration in a vector, exporting that design as a PNG is a common step.

      • ID RootHow To Install WordPress with LEMP Stack on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS - idroot

        In this tutorial, we will show you how to install WordPress with LEMP Stack on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, WordPress is a free and open-source content management system mainly used to publish blogs on the internet. It is written in PHP and used MariaDB or MySQL as a database backend. WordPress CMS has many customization tools, such as an administrative dashboard with a user-friendly interface to create new web pages, add media, and more. WordPress is one of the most used CMS in the market today.

        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 WordPress with LEMP Stack on Ubuntu 22.04 (Jammy Jellyfish). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 22.04 and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint, Elementary OS, Pop!_OS, and more as well.

      • Add, Delete And Grant Sudo Privileges To Users In Ubuntu - OSTechNix

        This tutorial explains how to add, delete and grant Sudo privileges to users in Ubuntu Linux operating system. The guide is officially tested on Ubuntu 22.04 and 20.04 LTS editions. However, the steps provided below are same for other Ubuntu-based distributions such as Pop!_OS.

        Before getting into the topic, let us see what is sudo and its benefits.

      • Wouter Verhelst: Faster tar

        I have a new laptop. The new one is a Dell Latitude 5521, whereas the old one was a Dell Latitude 5590.

        As both the old and the new laptops are owned by the people who pay my paycheck, I'm supposed to copy all my data off the old laptop and then return it to the IT department.

        A simple way of doing this (and what I'd usually use) is to just rsync the home directory (and other relevant locations) to the new machine. However, for various reasons I didn't want to do that this time around; for one, my home directory on the old laptop is a bit of a mess, and a new laptop is an ideal moment in time to clean that up. If I were to just rsync over the new home directory, then, well.

      • VideoHow to install Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 - Invidious

        In this video, I am going to show how to install Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.

    • Games

    • Desktop Environments/WMs

      • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

        • Kubuntu General News: Plasma 5.25 Beta available for testing

          Are you using Kubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish, our current Stable release? Or are you already running our development builds of the upcoming 22.10 Kinetic Kudu?

          We currently have Plasma 5.24.90 (Plasma 5.25 Beta) available in our Beta PPA for Kubuntu 22.04, and in the Ubuntu archive and daily ISO build for the 22.10 development series.

      • GNOME Desktop/GTK

        • Customize GNOME 42 with A Polished Look

          This article shows how you can customize GNOME 42 with Materia theme, Kora icons, Bibata cursors and extensions.

        • Sam Thursfield: Status update, 19/05/2022

          I had some ambitious travel plans last month – ambitious by 2020’s standards, anyway – and somehow they came off without any major issues or contagions. In Cologne I was amazed to go to Freedom Sounds festival and witness the return of the Singers ATX alongside host of other ska legends. And then my first ever trip to Italy where I attended Linux App Summit. It was a treat to be around people who are as enthusiastic as I am about the rather niche topic of Linux desktop apps… but hopefully it’s a topic which is becoming less niche.

          [...]

          updating Fedora on my partners laptop. This particular laptop was lacking a Wifi driver but that is now solved in Fedora 36. I can provide yet another datapoint that the GNOME 42 screenshot experience creates joy and happiness.

  • Distributions and Operating Systems

    • SUSE/OpenSUSE

      • openSUSE Tumbleweed – Review of the week 2022/20

        Dear Tumbleweed users and hackers,

        This week, we released 6 snapshots. One snapshot hit reached the (negative) record of most failed tests in one run. The issue was simply that YaST was unable to start, which for rather obvious reasons impacts almost all tests. This could swiftly be corrected and the following snapshot already worked again. The 6 published snapshots were 0512, 0513, 0515, 0516, 0517, and 0518.

    • Fedora Family / CentOS / Red Hat / IBM

      • Fedora ProjectFedora Community Blog: Friday’s Fedora Facts: 2022-20

        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)!

      • CentOSCentOS Community Newsletter, May 2022

        CentOS will be holding a free online Dojo on June 17. CentOS Dojos are mini conferences highlighting the work within the project and across the entire ecosystem. Registration is free but required. We invite everybody to join us.

        The call for presentations is open. We welcome presentations about CentOS Stream, CentOS SIGs, RHEL, and projects built on top of CentOS.

      • IBM Old TimerFormer IBM executive Irving Wladawsky-Berger: The 2022 Work Trend Index: How to Get Hybrid Right [Ed: Boosting a bunch of self-serving PR from Microsoft]
      • Enterprisers ProjectRemote work: 5 tips to keep your teams healthy and successful

        The pandemic forced organizations of all types to re-imagine the way employees work. In many fields, this meant the introduction of remote and hybrid work models. While this shift was necessary to address immediate health and safety requirements, it also resulted in some unintended consequences.

      • Enterprisers ProjectReveal these most-wanted soft skills from IT pros during the interview

        When comparing two strong candidates for an IT role, soft skills - the qualities that go beyond the resume - often set apart the one who wins the job. There’s an art to demonstrating these unique skills during an interview; examples are key - the more specific, the better - CIOs say.

        CIOs who recently won the 2022 Arizona CIO of the Year ORBIE Awards shared with us the soft skills they are looking for in candidates now and how they are making hiring decisions based on these attributes.

        Read on for advice for both IT professionals and hiring managers, including specific questions to ask during the interview process.

    • Canonical/Ubuntu Family

      • UbuntuHow to raise funding for your robotics venture | Chapter 2 – Akara | Ubuntu

        Our guest in this second webinar is Dr. Conor McGinn, CEO of Akara Robotics. Conor is a pioneer in assistive robotics. He was featured in the MIT Technology Review Innovators Under 35. He spun out Akara while working at Trinity College. The Irish company captured the public’s attention with their humanoid robot Stevie, which is designed to support elderly care and was featured on TIME magazine. Recently, their UV robot Violet was awarded more than €2.4M in funding through the highly competitive EIC program. The company has won several awards due to their work, including the 2022 CIO & IT leaders awards for Pilot Project of the Year.

        Conor is a skilled robotics engineer, human-robot interaction designer and entrepreneur. He is also an educator. During the webinar, he will share how he took his company from a project that started in academia to one of the most promising healthcare robotics ventures in Europe.

    • Open Hardware/Modding

      • CNX SoftwareLilyGO T-HC32 board with the world's smallest Arm MCU (HC32L110B6) is now available for $9 - CNX Software

        HC32L110 Arm Cortex-M0+ MCU is found in a minuscule 1.59 x 1.436 mm CSP16 package that should make it the world’s smallest Arm MCU. LilyGO T-HC32 is one of the first boards with the HC32L110B6 microcontroller, and it is now available for $8.98 on Aliexpress including shipping.

        The board offers really basic features with two buttons, a WS2812 RGB LED, and two-row of ten pins each for GPIOs and power signals, plus a 4-pin header for SWD programming. There’s nothing really special about the board or its price, except for the MCU’s size that’s barely discernable from a discrete component, and much smaller than the 7x7mm ESP32-PICO-D4 system-in-package shown in the photo below for comparison.

  • Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

    • Kapow 1.6.0 released

      Switched to Qt 6

    • Welcome new directors [Ed: Carlo Piana is a very good addition to OSI. But they have too many Microsofters in there, still. Most of the OSI's budget goes to Microsoft. It's a compromised organisation.]

      The 2022 election is over and the OSI has three new Directors Carlo Piana, Josh Berkus and Amanda Brock and one re-elected, Pamela Chestek. Please join me in congratulating them, they’re joining as the Board continues modernizing its function and role. I think we underestimate how much emotional effort goes into running for such a visible and competitive position so my gratitude goes to the candidates who didn’t get elected.

    • Exploring the future of Open Source [Ed: Stefano Maffulli speaks of "open source movement", but it's not a movement, it's a corporate plot/ploy to crush the real movement, called Free software. Stefano Maffulli knows his true masters; they're not Free software hackers who laid all the foundations, they're proprietary software companies looking to exploit and plunder those hackers while rewriting history.]
    • Web Browsers

    • Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra

      • Document FoundationIndonesian LibreOffice community: recent activities

        On Wednesday, 18 May 2022, I had the opportunity to talk in one of the sessions at the Virtual Visit of SMK Amaliah 1 Ciawi Bogor. This activity is a routine agenda for Amaliah Vocational School in the form of seminars and visits to institutions or communities to broaden students’ knowledge of Information and Communication Technology to Support Creative and Innovative Education.

    • Content Management Systems (CMS)

      • MedevelMrDoc is a web-based document management system DMS

        MrDoc is a free, open-source DMS (Document Management System) that does not require extensive hardware resources and can run from anywhere.

        It offers two versions; an open-source edition which licensed under the GPLv3 License, and a professional commercial version with more enterprise-focused features.

        MrDoc is a feature-rich system that has dozens of features, but keep in mind it is built to organize and manage online text documents.

    • FSFE

      • FSFEFSFE signs Dutch manifesto calling for education improvements

        Students should not have to use proprietary software to participate in the educational process. The FSFE joins the Dutch coalition ‘Fair Digital Education’ supporting privacy-respecting solutions involving Free Software in schools.

    • Programming/Development

      • QtSwitching to SPDX license identifiers in Qt sources

        A Qt source file traditionally starts with a comment containing copyright statements and the full license text. Luckily, programmers aren't bothered by this wall of text - their code editors do a good job of hiding it. Still, there are certain problems with traditional license headers, and this article explores how we address these issues.

        It is of course somewhat inelegant to have countless copies of the same license text in the source tree, but there are more pressing problems than that.

      • Rust

        • SDx CentralOpenSSF, Linux Foundation Want to Replace C, C++ [Ed: Using red herrings to replace standards with a pile of censorshipware controlled by Microsoft; of course there's a missing disclosure there as many sites that push and enhance LF talking points (read: monopolies) in fact receive funding/bribes to do this]

          The Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF) and the Linux Foundation released an action plan to improve open source software’s security and resilience. Part of that is eliminating non-memory-safe programming languages like C and C++.

          The action plan specifically proposes a $5.5 million investment to remove root causes of vulnerabilities by replacing non-memory-safe languages.

          Programming languages like C and C++ create challenges for memory safety and difficulties in finding and eliminating defects. Languages like Go and Rust, however, “handle memory management and other kinds of security-sensitive tasks safely by default.” This makes it easier for developers to avoid entire vulnerability categories, according to the plan.

        • The New StackRust: What’s Next for the Fast-Growing Programming Language? [Ed: Loaded title; it's not so fast-growing and there have been growing pains]
        • FOSSLifeWhat’s Next for Rust?
        • Governance Update [Ed: Rust project has been in disarray with many resignations; this is a face-saving update]

          Last month, the core team, all the leads of top-level teams, the moderators, and the project representatives on the Rust Foundation board jointly sent out an update to all Rust project members on investigations happening into improvements to the governance of the Rust project.

          As is detailed in the update, this report follows extensive conversations with many inside of the project and will continue as we encourage others in the project to reach out should they have feedback or want to get involved.

  • Leftovers

    • Security

      • LWNSecurity updates for Friday [LWN.net]

        Security updates have been issued by CentOS (kernel), Debian (ark, openldap, and thunderbird), Fedora (freetype and vim), Oracle (.NET 5.0, .NET 6.0, .NET Core 3.1, container-tools:3.0, glibc, kernel, rsync, and subversion:1.10), Scientific Linux (kernel), SUSE (dcraw, firefox, glib2, ImageMagick, kernel-firmware, libxml2, libyajl, php7, ucode-intel, and unrar), and Ubuntu (openldap).

      • TechTargetCiti gives software supply chain security kit to OpenSSF
      • Reproducible Builds (diffoscope): diffoscope 213 released

        The diffoscope maintainers are pleased to announce the release of diffoscope version 213. This version includes the following changes:

        * Don't mask differences in .zip/.jar central directory extra fields.
        * Don't show a binary comparison of .zip/.jar files if we have at least
          one observed nested difference.
        * Use assert_diff in test_zip over get_data and separate assert.
        

    • Censorship/Free Speech

      • The Mantle of Responsibility

        Great article about how messed up it is that the ADL is conflating white supremacy with hafrada-critical groups like CAIR and JVP and how stark that messed-up–ness appears in the face of white supremacist terrorism. (And that there are conservative Jews that are themselves repeating anti-CRT, replacement theory talking points.)

    • Monopolies

      • Patents

        • Trivial Patents

          I opposed and ended a trivial patent once (I found prior art) but the lesson I learned from that is that it’s important to oppose even non-trivial patents. If I identify and stop only the stupid patents, I’m only doing the work of the patent office for them.

          In the case of something like “Bionic Reading” (a proprietary system that bolds part of the words) the claimed part is not the implementation, it’s the idea and the research to verify the idea. That’s exactly the difference between patents and copyright. Copyright restricts an implementation (which, for something like code or a movie can be a very non-trivial implementation of a trivial idea. Like, the movie “The Matrix”, the idea is simple (“guy gets chosen to fight in modem land“) but the implementation cost $63 million. Patents restricts an idea (which can be an idea that’s unintuitive and difficult to come up with and verify), but the implementation is like two lines of JS.



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