In the Linux Release Roundup series, we summarize the new distribution and application version releases in the past week. This keeps you informed of the latest developments in the Linux world.
Small PC makers are bringing some open source ethos of sharing ideas and making products better into laptop designs.
A small hardware shop called Framework last week launched a modular laptop that can be upgraded by just replacing parts as opposed to replacing the laptop. The Framework laptop is optimized for the Fedora distribution, and tweaks are being made to bring full hardware support for Ubuntu 22.04.
Since its debut more than four years ago, (yeah, it has been four years) Linux on ChromeOS has made some significant improvements and added some major value to the Chrome operating system as a whole. While not a full-blown Linux desktop environment, the Crostini container gives users access to powerful Linux packages that can’t be installed on ChromeOS. Linux on ChromeOS now has direct access to the GPU and USB devices and you can share folders and external drives directly with the Linux environment.
If you know your way around the Linux terminal and you have a capable device, there’s very little that cannot be accomplished on a Chromebook. The one, glaring omission from the ChromeOS Linux container remains to be a point of confusion for myself and many other Chromebook users. Despite having access to USB devices and external storage, Linux on ChromeOS has yet to support the use of a camera. I’m not referring to an external webcam. I mean cameras, period. If you install a simple webcam package such as Cheese, it simply cannot see your device’s webcam.
We have seen a massive increase in the “real world” dependency on digital services in the last few years. This process will probably continue in the future, and we are not ready for it. In the same few years, we have seen a lot of cases where digital services went offline or got hacked. In a society that relies more and more on digital services, we can not afford such services not to be available or secure. Although security is essential, I want to focus on availability for now.
Being able to game on Linux is great but there are some parts that need a bit of tweaking and optimization to be as good as can be luckily there are plenty of tools to help out.
Today we are looking at Peppermint OS 5-22-2022. It comes with XFCE 4.16, Linux kernel 5.10, based on Debian 11, and uses about 700-800MB of ram when idling. Enjoy!
In this video, we are looking at Peppermint OS 5-22-2022.
We break with tradition and talk about some of the things we love about Linux and FOSS. Plus overhyped NVIDIA news, Google relents on free custom email accounts, Félim is trolled about Chromebooks, KDE Korner, and a Rust supply-chain attack drags up an old debate.
Lomorage is a free open-source self-hosted photo hosting and cataloging system for photographers or anyone who wants to keep a secure backup for his photos.
It is a fairly new player in the market of open-source photo solutions, however, it comes with dozens of new and unique features than its competitors.
In the nutshell, Lomorage offers you an ideal alternative for Google Photos with more extra options as you can host it at any server or machine, and maintain your original quality of your photos and videos.
curl --rate is your new friend.
This option is for when you use curl to do many requests in a single command line, but you want curl to not do them as quickly as possible. You want curl to do them no more often than at a certain interval. This is a way to slow down the request frequency curl would otherwise possibly use. Tell curl to do the transfers no faster than…
This is a completely different and separate option from the transfer speed rate limit option --limit-rate that has existed for a long time.
A primary reason for using this option is when the server end has a certain capped acceptance rate or other cases where you know it makes no sense to do the requests faster than at a certain interval.
With this new option, you specify the maximum transfer frequency you allow curl to use – in number of transfer starts per time unit (sometimes called request rate) with the new --rate option.
Securing websites, especially those that saves users information, is of utmost importance. We use SSL certificates to secure communication between users & websites. SSL certificates helps in encrypting communication between user & website, so even if a person could get hold of the communication it will be almost impossible for him to decrypt the data.
Follow through this tutorial to learn how to integrate sysPass with OpenLDAP for authentication and account management.
Setting up a slurm cluster for testing purpose is always time consuming and error prone. Especially if just some smaller changes in the configuration have to be tested.
In order to automate this, I have written a small test setup based on kiwi and terraform.
The kiwi part builds one image and bakes in the slurm.conf and a proper shared nfs /home. As all nodes boot from the same image the munge key, which is generated at install time, is the same.
So all configuration files are in the right place.
ASTRONEER is a sandbox adventure game developed and published by System Era Softworks. The game was released on Microsoft Windows, Xbox One, PS4, and Nintendo Switch. Here’s how you can play ASTRONEER on your Linux desktop or laptop PC.
Ubuntu server is a well-oiled machine. Unfortunately, sometimes it can get bogged down with cache. This guide will cover how you can clean cache and free up swap on your Ubuntu system.
Today we are looking at how to install The Fertile Crescent 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.
Many useful programs are available for Ubuntu that don’t make their way to the official Ubuntu software repositories. Thankfully, the Deb-get program can bridge that gap by making it easy to install third-party software.
How does Deb-get work? It manually downloads DEB packages unavailable on Ubuntu package repos and feeds them into your system. This guide will show you how to use Deb-get to install third-party apps on Ubuntu with ease.
Cider isn’t the first app to come to Linux that allows users to listen to Apple Music on the desktop. However, it is the most stylish. It’s so good-looking that many users in the community claim it has a better UI than Apple.
If you want a stylish Apple Music app for your Linux desktop? If so, follow this guide to learn how to set up Cider on your system.
Automation can help increase efficiency, save time and improve consistency, which is why Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) includes features that help automate many tasks. RHEL System Roles are a collection of Ansible content that helps provide more consistent workflows and streamline the execution of many manual tasks.
Firewalls are an important aspect to system security as they control network traffic flow on systems. This can range from basic firewall operations to allow traffic on a certain port to more advanced functionality using multiple zones. The RHEL firewall can be used for other actions as well, such as port forwarding. For more information on the RHEL firewall, see the using and configuring firewalld documentation.
The Call for Participation for Akademy is officially opened!
...and closes relatively shortly! Sunday the 12th of June 2022
Take a look at this on your own and judge. It may not be in the official repositories but the last commit is signed by the Founder of Obarun and the rest by his co-author. When OUR was released to the public one of the claimed rules of participation was to not build any parts of systemd or any package that wouldn’t conform to Obarun. Obarun’s version of pacman incorporated a block from installing systemd or its libraries. Elogind is the central part, the essence of systemd.
When you have no set principles and values, anything goes, and you can drift from one character to another, without remorse. Obarun will not be removed from the strict list of distros without systemd or elogind, but as soon as this OUR package moves to the repos it will be “bye bye” Obarun from any mention in this site. At least VOID never claimed to not involve systemd or its parts into the distribution, people just assumed it was systemd-free because of the use of runit and consolekit. So VOID was more justified to switch to systemd’s logind.
Version 3.16.0 of the Alpine Linux distribution has been released. Significant changes include a switch to tmpfs for the /tmp directory, the splitting out of a number of NetworkManager plugins into separate packages, the removal of Python 2, and a lot of updated packages; see the release notes for more information.
Modernizing an existing codebase—or often a portfolio of them—is a complex technical endeavor. In the enterprise environment, there are challenges beyond the technical that can hinder or halt modernization.
Over decades of running technology at scale, enterprises have formed unique footprints of culture, politics and protective security practices that influence all technical outcomes. In order to effect lasting change, it’s essential to simultaneously address technical problems while being mindful of these unique footprints.
This is the first of a planned series of articles that outlines the unique challenges of modernizing existing software in enterprises and details a strategy that is inclusive of key aspects of the enterprise culture, while providing approaches to changing existing applications that open the door to future innovations.
We welcome the new release of ROS 2 Humble which targets the recently released Ubuntu 22.04. If you want to install it now, please visit the ROS 2 Humble documentation.
But if you want to install ROS 2 Humble and test compatibility, keeping your current Ubuntu (20.04, 18.04,…) environment stable until you know you are ready to upgrade, you can dive into LXD containers.
Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue 736 for the week of May 15 – 21, 2022.
HPE and Canonical have a long-standing relationship, certifying Ubuntu on HPE hardware. Now, you can go beyond the operating system and engage with us on hybrid cloud, AI/ML, and open source support projects.
Now we’re excited to share that we’ll be at the HPE Discover 2022 in Las Vegas on June 28-30 showcasing our solution in the expo.
From the latest insights in secure connectivity, hybrid cloud, AI and unified data analytics, HPE Discover 2022 is the best place to stay ahead of the trends and technologies that will move your business forward, faster.
When imagining motion sensors, devices such as accelerometers, infrared detectors, and LiDAR units probably come to mind. But due to the complexity and oftentimes high costs of these parts, researchers Joseph Liew and Keng Wei Ng from the National University of Singapore wanted to create a lower-cost and easier-to-assemble alternative. Their solution, called ESsense, uses the electrostatic properties of objects to sense motion.
At the core of the product, ESsense relies on a pair of materials and an Arduino. The first material is a dielelectric that carries a static charge, whereas the second is a stationary conductive material such as a copper pad. The movement of the former near the surface of the latter causes a current to be induced, which can then be read by the connected microcontroller. Lower humidity levels are greatly preferred since they allow the air to more effectively transfer a charge, but for higher ones, the team created a small PCB-mounted circuit that boosts the signal via an amplifier.
Also: The next Plasma release is inching closer with 5.25 beta, connecting external displays to the Poco F1 with Display Link, some NixOS, and more!
I’ve been thinking a lot of late about what “libre” and “open” mean to me, in large part by thinking about movements adjacent to open source software, and how open software might learn/borrow from its progeny. I hope to go into that more this summer, but in the meantime, I’m publishing this as a related “just blog it and get it out” note.
This post continues the discussion of Toolforge updates as described in a previous post. Every non-trivial task performed in Toolforge (like executing a script or running a bot) should be dispatched to a job scheduling backend, which ensures that the job is run in a suitable place with sufficient resources.
A keylogger is a computer program designed to monitor keyboard inputs, generally in a covert manner to ensure that person being monitored is unaware of the activity. These programs generally monitor lower level keyboard events (e.g. key up and key down); and can run anywhere from kernel space to userspace depending upon design.
Happy Friday, everyone --here's what the Apache community has been up to over the past week...
One-stop DevOps shop GitLab has announced version 15 of its platform, hot on the heels of pull-based GitOps turning up on the platform's free tier.
Version 15.0 marks the arrival of GitLab's next major iteration and attention this time around has turned to visibility and observability – hardly surprising considering the acquisition of OpsTrace as 2021 drew to a close, as well as workflow automation, security and compliance.
GitLab puts out monthly releases – hitting 15.1 on June 22 – and we spoke to the company's senior director of Product, Kenny Johnston, at the recent Kubecon EU event, about what will be added to version 15 as time goes by. During a chat with the company's senior director of Product, Kenny Johnston, at the recent Kubecon EU event, The Register was told that this was more where dollars were being invested into the product.
Of Opstrace, Johnston said: "We're going to be spending 15 integrating that really deeply with all of GitLab."
Wenzel P.P. Peppmeyer has taken last week’s Weekly Challenge to show how you can have your math look like Raku, or was it the other way around? And using a simple tweak, making the code use multiple CPU’s to get results faster (/r/rakulang comments)!
This is a choose your own adventure book that originally belonged to my big sister. For those who don't speak Finnish, the book is called The Haunted Railway Book and it uses the characters from Enid Blyton's Famous Five, which is a well known series of adventure books for children (or maybe YA, don't know, I haven't actually read any of them).
The game itself is fairly involved. Instead of just doing random choices you have multiple items like a map and a compass that you can obtain and lose during the game and even hit points that are visualised as, obviously, food. I figured it might be interesting to work out how the game has been designed. Like all adventure game books the story has been split into different numbered chapters and you progress in the story by going from one chapter to another according to the rules.
In other words the game is a directed acyclic graph. Going through the entire book and writing it out as a Graphviz file, this is what the adventure looks like. The start point is at the top and to win you need to get to the second to last node without losing all your hit points and having the code book in your possession. The gv file is available in this repo for those who want to examine it themselves.
Broadcom is in early talks to buy VMware, according to The New York Times, Bloomberg, and Reuters.
VMware is not commenting on the matter.
This one is interesting, because the three sources we've linked to above all say they've got the news from "a person familiar with the matter." All say the deal is nowhere near done, a price has not been discussed, and a transaction is far from certain to happen.
It's notable that three outlets have been offered the same assessment because leaking news of this sort is a tactic sometimes employed to test market reaction to a deal.
Everyone has received the mails trying to extort money by claiming to have hacked a person’s webcam and recorded a video of them watching porn. These are a bluff of course, but the popular Screencastify browser extension actually provides all the infrastructure necessary for someone to pull this off. A website that a user visited could trick the extension into starting a webcam recording among other things, without any indications other than the webcam’s LED lighting up if present. The website could then steal the video from the user’s Google Drive account that it was uploaded to, along with anything else that account might hold.
Screencastify is a browser extension that aids you in creating a video recording of your entire screen or a single window, optionally along with your webcam stream where you explain what you are doing right now. Chrome Web Store shows “10,000,000+ users” for it which is the highest number it will display – same is shown for extensions with more than 100 million users. The extension is being marketed for educational purposes and gained significant traction in the current pandemic.
As of now, it appears that Screencastify only managed to address the Cross-site Scripting vulnerability which gave arbitrary websites access to the extension’s functionality, as opposed to “merely” Screencastify themselves and a dozen other vendors they work with. As this certainly won’t be their last Cross-site Scripting vulnerability, I sincerely recommend staying clear of this browser extension.
The PyPI "pymafka" package is the latest example of growing attacker interest in abusing widely used open source software repositories.
When I first started using Linux, things were exponentially more complicated. The distributions were far less mature, but they also required the use of a particular system account to get certain things done. That account was root, and with it, you had unlimited power over your operating system.
To demonstrate the power of root, one trick you could always play on unsuspecting users was to tell them to change to the root user with the command su and then have them issue the following command:
When I first started using Linux, back in '97, working with the built-in firewall was not something just anyone could do. In fact, it was quite complicated. Starting around 1998, if you want to manage the security of a system, you had to learn iptables (which is a suite of commands for manipulating the Netfilter packet filtering system).
The prevalence of Wi-Fi has been accelerating for two decades, but in the last two years, it’s surged even further as so many people were forced to work from home. That trend led to many strengthening the performance of their Wi-Fi networks. But security remains a problem.
CISA has added 21 new vulnerabilities to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities Catalog, based on evidence of active exploitation. These types of vulnerabilities are a frequent attack vector for malicious cyber actors and pose significant risk to the federal enterprise. Note: to view the newly added vulnerabilities in the catalog, click on the arrow on the of the "Date Added to Catalog" column, which will sort by descending dates.
Surfshark is one of the better-known VPN providers and is often seen being promoted by large YouTube accounts. Today, the company announced the availability of its VPN on Linux with an entire graphical user interface, or GUI.
Today, the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals announced its opinion in Netchoice v. Attorney General, State of Florida, finding that Florida’s S.B. 7072 violates the First Amendment. The law declared social media platforms to be common carriers, and restricted their content moderation and editorial decisions. Public Knowledge has previously explained why social media platforms are not, and should not, be treated like common carriers.
The following can be attributed to John Bergmayer, Legal Director at Public Knowledge:
“Today’s decision is a victory for the First Amendment. Florida’s S.B. 7072 would have ordered social media platforms to host and distribute horrific and distasteful content, and to turn a blind eye to hate and abuse.
Public Knowledge has the pleasure of inviting you to a multifaceted program focused on training and developing the next generation of tech policy experts and public interest advocates that reflects the diversity of voices and experiences in our society.
Please join us for our monthly Career Breakfast Series. This event is designed for students & recent graduates to learn about tech policy and public interest work, careers, and its community. This month you will have the opportunity of having a great conversation with Dr. Alisa Valentin, the Senior Director of Technology and Telecommunications Policy at the National Urban League.
Dr. Valentin was previously the Special Advisor to FCC Commissioner Geoffrey Starks where she advised the Commissioner on broadband access and adoption, prison phone justice, and future of work policies specifically related to communities of color, low-income communities, and other marginalized populations.
Antitrust bills like S. 2992 and H.R. 3816 would increase the operating costs of five targeted firms (Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta, and Microsoft) and force them to restructure, spin off, or discontinue many integrated services within their platforms. Startups and other small business users of impacted services would be first among the many users harmed by these developments. Startups and small businesses are purportedly the intended beneficiaries of these bills, but would face the loss of a key part of the ecosystem in which they thrive: a wide array of free and low-cost services provided directly or indirectly by the five targeted firms that allow startups and small businesses to reach up to millions of customers at minimal cost. Many of these services are offered at free or discounted rates for startups and small businesses.
Startups and small businesses would face incremental costs from the loss of integrated online platforms and marketplaces that allow them to run their business operations and even generate revenue without incurring higher sales, marketing, and advertising costs that would otherwise be required to connect to consumers.