Recently, The Register's Liam Proven wrote tongue in cheek about the most annoying desktop Linux distros. He inspired me to do another take.
Proven pointed out that Distrowatch currently lists 270 – count 'em – Linux distros. Of course, no one can look at all of those. But, having covered the Linux desktop since the big interface debate was between Bash and zsh rather than GNOME vs KDE, and being the editor-in-chief of a now-departed publication called Linux Desktop, I think I've used more of them than anyone else who also has a life beyond the PC. In short, I love the Linux desktop.
You don’t need to dive deep into any conversation concerning the company to come across someone wistfully wishing that the Denver, US-based outfit would ships its wares outside of the United States.
As the biggest independent Linux laptop seller —citation needed? I don’t think so— expanding its reach beyonds its home borders is something of an inevitable yet interesting next step.
And now it’s happening!
Do your clients complain about interruptions during software upgrades? Do you observe connection failures or timeouts during those upgrades? In this article, you'll learn how you can minimize the impacts on your client visiting your services hosted on the Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform during software updates.
A rolling update creates new pods running the new software and terminates old ones. The deployment controller performs this rollout incrementally, ensuring that a certain number of new pods are ready before the controller deletes the old pods that the new pods are replacing. For details, see Rolling strategy in the Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform documentation.
Home Depot recently switched to a system based on SLES, Rancher, and K3s for running its more than 2,300 remote locations.
It's time once again for The Weekender. This is our departure into the world of hedonism, random topic excursions, whimsy and (hopefully) knowledge. Thanks for listening and, if you happen to get a chance, feel free to call us or e-mail and send us some feedback. Tell us how we're doing. We'd love to hear from you.
Plus Mike’s first impressions of the HP Dev One laptop.
Geometry nodes from the pre-3.0 named attribute system have been removed. See the geometry nodes release notes for details.
Blender 3.2 is here only three months after Blender 3.1 and introduces new rendering features like a new type of Cycles render pass consisting only of the lighting from a subset of light sources, the ability to use light groups to modify the color and/or intensity of light sources in the compositor without re-rendering.
There’s also a big new feature for Linux users in Blender 3.2, namely AMD GPU rendering support for RDNA and RDNA2 family of AMD Radeon graphics cards, including the Radeon RX 5000 and RX 6000 series, as well as Radeon Pro W6000 series.
I've not done too much work with Docker Desktop. Also, I think that power users will be just as comfortable with the command line and their own scripting. But for those who like a somewhat simpler approach, Docker Desktop does provide the combination of intuitive technology and friendly tooling. You get a solid product that lets you play with containers, test applications, automate your work, and then deploy your solutions in a resemblance of a serious productivity pipeline that you get in larger infrastructures, which is the whole idea of solutions like this.
There were some snags, like the installation service bug, and the terminal launch glitch, but other than that, I was quite happy with my brief brush with Docker Desktop. The overall feel is quite consistent, and has remained so over the years. All in all, 'twas a good day. Worth testing, so there you go.
I recently discovered "lace", which is a tinylog personal aggregator.
[...]
Type your chirp, and finish it by putting a "." on a new line. Nothing else. The utility will date it for you, and edit your tinylog file. It looks for the signifier "---" on a line by itself to separate introductory material from the main content. So you will need to add it after any preamble.
You need to edit the "settings.rkt" file to set the value of "tinylog-file", which is the location of your tinylog file.
About six months ago I began offering a chess service on my capsule. Visitors could invite others to play a match in correspondence fashion similar to postal games. While I've received little direct feedback about the service, I've been watching how players interact with it and with each other.
In the process, I've discovered that the service requires some major improvements. Some of those improvements involve changing what data about each match is stored and how. This means I need to rewrite the service backend, and the rewrite will not be compatible with current game data.
Your favorite GNOME extension is marked as “INCOMPATIBLE“? It might still work!
There are so many extensions to help improve Ubuntu, Fedora, or other Linux’s GNOME desktop experience. Some of them may be outdated for your GNOME version. So, you see “incompatible” instead of on/off switch when try installing via a web browser.
In this video, I am going to show how to install deepin 20.6.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Apache Web Server on AlmaLinux 9. For those of you who didn’t know, Apache is an open-source and widely used web server. It’s an open-source and cross-platform web server software developed and maintained by Apache Software Foundation. It’s easy to set up and learn to use, which has led to its widespread adoption for small and large-scale websites.
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 Apache Web Server on AlmaLinux 9. You can follow the same instructions for CentOS and Rocky Linux.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Netdata on Rocky Linux 8. For those of you who didn’t know, Netdata is an open source real-time server monitoring tool. It offers hundreds of tools to monitor servers, CPU, memory usage, system processes, disk usage, IPv4 and IPv6 networks, system firewall, and many more.
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 Netdata monitoring tool on Rocky Linux. 8.
The first thing after installing FreeBSD is to create a regular user with sudo access. Because, it is always a best security practice to use a non-root user to perform server administration. This brief tutorial explains how to add, delete and grant sudo privileges to users in FreeBSD operating systems.
The Apache Hadoop or also known as Hadoop is an open-source, Java-based framework that allows for the distributed processing of large data sets across computers. It is used to store and process large datasets. It allows clustering multiple computers to store and process data more quickly instead of using a single large computer.
Follow through this post to learn how to install and setup Ceph Storage cluster on Ubuntu 22.04. 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.
Trying out multiple Linux distributions? Writing and rewriting to a single USB drive will test your patience, and managing a gaggle of drives quickly gets out of hand. Let’s learn to install Ventoy, a tool that can help you store and boot multiple distros with one USB stick.
In our modern era, users need the absolute simplest method of doing everything. With mobile devices, things like sharing files have become ubiquitous and as easy as it gets. Apple’s iOS has AirDrop and Android has Nearby Share, both of which make sharing files a no-brainer.
But then a Linux developer came along and created an app that makes transferring files from one Linux desktop to another so easy, it actually makes both iOS and Android look a bit antiquated.
That app in question is called Warp, and it can be installed on any Linux distribution that supports Flatpak. With Warp, you can transfer any type of file across your LAN to another Linux desktop – so long as it also has Warp installed – with such ease you’ll be shocked.
Let me show you what I mean.
Let’s discuss the steps to install the Pale Moon browser on Debian 11 Bullseye Linux using the command terminal.
The Web browser Pale Moon is a fork of Firefox. The program initiated and maintained by Moonchild Productions, like the original program, is licensed under the MPL license. However, special rules apply to the distribution of the binary version: Redistributing Pale Moon. In addition to Linux, it is also available for Windows and Mac (unofficially), and the Android version has been discontinued.
Pale Moon is based on the look of the old Firefox versions (FF 28 and earlier). Older plugins for Firefox incl. plugins that use the NPAPI interface are basically supported, the newer Firefox plugins (“Web Extensions”) do not work with Pale Moon, and support is not planned.
The design of “Pale Moon” and the basic structure are now also based on the latest version of Firefox. The browser is quite slim, uses the Goanna engine, and should be much faster at the start than its predecessor. Extensions and personas themes should also continue to work under “Pale Moon” without any problems.
Pale Moon is a web browser built on an independently developed source that offers features and optimizations to improve stability. It was forked off from Firefox/Mozilla code many years ago. Its focus is efficiency in use by carefully selecting what should be included – it has full customization options alongside this growing collection of tools!
SFTPGo is a free, open source, fully featured and highly configurable SFTP server with optional HTTP/S, FTP/S and WebDAV support. In this tutorial, you will learn how to install SFTPGo on Ubuntu 22.04 and we'll explore the main new features introduced in v2.3.0.
The Linux nohup command lets important processes carry on running even when the terminal window that launched them is closed. We show you how to use this venerable command on today’s Linux.
System76 might be a little-known computer hardware company to most but in the Linux community, these guys are heroes. Now, even if you aren’t privy to System76, Pop_OS! is becoming a household name in the Linux and computing community.
On top of Stock Ubuntu which Pop!_OS is based on, there are subtle, useful tweaks that System76 has made, further endearing Pop!_OS as a more wholesome desktop experience.
Luckily, Linux is an open platform and if you really do fancy something from a certain distro, with a little elbow grease, you can get it to work on your distro of choice.
Recently, I walked you through the process of deploying OpenLDAP server on Ubuntu Server 22.04. Following that guide, you should also have access to the user-friendly LDAP Account Manager (LAM), which is a web-based GUI that greatly simplifies the management of your OpenLDAP server.
One thing LAM does is make it far easier to add users to the LDAP directory tree. Instead of having to create user files to import from the command line, which isn’t all that challenging to begin with, you can make use of a point-and-click GUI for the process. Via LAM, you can even create accounts such that they can serve as centralized authorization for desktop users – even Linux desktops.
Snap Store is backed by Canonical, the same organization that developed the popular Debian-based Ubuntu Operating System.
The Canonical goal for the Snaps Packages is to create a standalone sandboxed application to package the application with the required dependencies and libraries.
This removes the use of outdated dependencies and libraries without affecting the operating system files making it easier for developers to develop an application and for users to use it.
The latest minor release of the openSUSE fixed release distro, openSUSE Leap 15.4, is out, bringing many updates to the existing package base.
openSUSE is a world-class Linux distribution. Aside from Debian and Ubuntu, openSUSE is perhaps the best multi-purpose distribution available. The distro is intended for desktop users and developers working on desktop or server platforms.
The developers’ goal was to bring Leap as close to SUSE Enterprise Linux as possible, and they have largely succeeded. Leap 15.4 is an excellent example of a reliable and stable Linux distribution, offering a wide range of tools for both the average desktop user and advanced system administrators and developers.
Fedora and Ubuntu are both outstanding Linux distributions, each of which takes a different path to the same goal. But what are their differences and similarities, and which is right for you?
Some years ago, had you asked me if Fedora Linux was a good option for new users, I would have answered with a resounding, “No way!”
That was then; this is now. Over the past couple of releases, Fedora has made great strides toward becoming an operating system fit for those with little experience. But has it caught up with Ubuntu? And what about advanced users?
Let’s take a look into the similarities and differences between Fedora and Ubuntu Linux and see if we can determine which might be the best fit for your needs.
There are quite a few web sites today with debian in the name. Only one of them is being targetted by the expensive law suit through WIPO. This tells us something: there is something on the debian.community web site that is inconvenient for somebody important. But what is it?
They told us that Outreachy money and other diversity grants were being awarded to improve female participation. Yet what we've seen in practice, and I saw this during the time I was a volunteer administrator for Google Summer of Code (GSoC), is that the sums of money being paid were disproportionate for some countries like Albania and at the same time this money arrived, at least one underage girl arrived too. I've probably spent more time helping free software communities in the Balkan countries than anybody else who is going to the DebConf in Kosovo this year so I've met all the people and I generally know what is true and false in this scandal.
When she first appeared in 2017, she presented herself as the youngest woman in the group. She presented herself as a high school student. She presented herself as a 16 year old. For me, having heard it directly from the woman in one of the events in the Balkans, I take it that was all fact.
It’s been a long journey since the first VA-API implementation in Firefox. Two years ago Firefox 77.0 come to Fedora with accelerated video playback on Wayland which was more a tech preview than a working solution.
Since then X11 support was added, fixed many bugs, AV1 decoding was implemented so we can claim VA-API code as mature enough to enable it for testing in Firefox Nightly 103. As we don’t want to scare peaceful Ubuntu users and grandmas watching their favorite show, VA-API is enabled in Nightly channel only and stock Firefox 103 won’t be shipped with that.
But ‘Real Men‘ wants more challenge. ‘Quiche Eaters’ can use polished software, LTS distros or even Mac. That’s nothing for adventurers running on the edge. Thus new Firefox updates (Fedora 35, Fedora 36) has VA-API enabled by default ahead of upstream to get what you asked for, brave Fedorans.
MongoDB, the company behind the document store database, has unveiled columnstore indexing designed to help developers build analytical queries into their applications.
Set to preview later this year, the feature is designed to allow developers to create a purpose-built index to accelerate analytical queries without requiring any changes to the document structure or having to move data to another system.
MongoDB chief product officer Sahir Azam told The Register the feature would be available in the database and Atlas DBaaS to support human-like decision making inside the application based on live data.
For many software companies, deployment is no longer manual. As they mature, they tend to move towards an engineering-driven process that is more controlled and automated, usually to reduce downtime. And Argo CD is one such tool which is a Kubernetes-native continuous deployment tool. Although many other external CD tools are available, it is the one that enables pull-based deployments.
Twenty-one years ago, in May 2001 we introduced the global initialization function to libcurl version 7.8 called curl_global_init().
The main reason we needed this separate function to get called before anything else was used in libcurl, was that several of libcurl’s dependencies at the time (including OpenSSL and GnuTLS) had themselves thread-unsafe initialization procedures.
This rather lame characteristic found in several third party dependencies made the libcurl function inherit that property: not thread-safe. A nasty “feature” in a library that otherwise prides itself for being thread-safe and in many ways working at “it should”. A function that is specifically marked as thread unsafe was not good. Is not good.
Still, we were victims of circumstances and if these were the dependencies we were going to use, this is what we needed to do.
Occasionally, this limitation has poked people in the eye and really hurt them since it makes some use cases really difficult to realize.
I'm looking for someone to take over as maintainer of these distributions. Some of these distributions contain relatively important modules, like Redis and IO-Socket-Timeout.
As part of HalleLeipzig.pm I had my duties to co-organize the recent German Perl Workshop but also the opportunity to give some talks. (Recordings are online soon at the CCC video platform). My main talk was about plotting data with Perl (english slides).
I covered the data preparation phase and which Perl modules can handle the necessary math (Stats::Basic, Statistics::PCA, Statistics::KernelEstimation, Math::Spline and so on ). I also taught some color and design theory and how to use the proper visualization properties depending on importance and data type (and modules like Color::Library, Convert::Color, colorbrewer). The third part was a review of all the big and small plot libs on CPAN. And there was a lot to roast because especially the pure Perl ones are often half baked with lots of shortcomings, but also most of the big libraries (wrappers) had serious issues (may post for another day). This process led me also to investigate the module Chart, which was kinda feature complete, well documented, had some 90'ies charm, but also some minor technical issues like can't install from CPAN. So I took the adventure and overtook maintainership, wich went surprisingly smoothly.
The current state: The Perl interpreter and most of CPAN are provided under the Artistic 1.0 license and the GPL1.0 license. The Artistic 1.0 license was written by Larry Wall and due to its problems Perl is simultaneously licensed under the GPL 1.0 License.
It is the de-facto standard to license software published to CPAN under the same terms as the Perl interpreter.
The Artistic 2.0 license supersedes the Artistic 1.0 license and is designed to overcome it's problems. Raku uses this license as it was specifically created for Perl 6. Mojolicious also uses this license.
The Artistic licenses are not widely used outside the Perl & Raku sphere.
I always find the topic Memory Management very fascinating. Perl being the Perl, there is nothing you need to worry about. All memory management is done for us for FREE.
Still, there was something, I always wanted to find out about memory management in Perl.
PyScript allows you to create rich Python applications in the browser using nothing but HTML and Python code. Although it’s super rough and super new, I can tell you this will be a game-changing part of the Python ecosystem. It’s worth keeping a close watch on this one!
This article explains what PyScript is and how it works. I also included a fully working PyScript REPL for you to play with.
I have grand plans to establish a repeat survey of the trees in the New Wood which was planted in April 2021. I want to get a better idea of which species are doing well, the mortality rate, and maybe eventually see if there are any spatial patterns in competition among individuals. I did the first survey in September 2021, but only just finished entering the data, as it fell to the bottom of my todo list. I'd like to do another survey in September this year. Last year I think it took about 5 hours to do the whole survey, but I split it over a few days. If I make sure I'm prepared this time I reckon I can do it in a day. I've created an ODK form to cut down on the time spent transcribing data from notebook to computer.
Kate Bush hit the top 10 of the Billboard Hot 100 in the most Kate Bush way possible this week, appearing on the chart as a result of her best-known song, “Running Up That Hill,” showing up in the latest season of Stranger Things, leading to a well-deserved rediscovery of one of the great musical talents of the ’80s. ”It’s all really exciting! Thanks very much to everyone who has supported the song,” she wrote in a statement on her website, which she doesn’t make very often. Bush is far from the only artist to see a song re-emerge thanks to unexpected commercial notice years after the fact. (Just ask Simon & Garfunkel, who saw “The Sound of Silence” appear on the Hot 100 Recurrents in 2016 thanks to, of all things, the Sad Affleck meme.) Usually, the approach is actually a bit more calculated, one that leverages the quirks of the charts in unexpected ways. Today’s Tedium ponders the way the music industry jockeys for position on the Billboard charts. — Ernie @ Tedium
This made me chuckle, as it reminded me of a professor at my old university. He was a clever chap, naturally, but I never approved of his sense of organisation. He had a huge stack of papers on his desk. It led me to joke that he didn't file things alphabetically, but by centimeters from the bottom.
Built around two Arm Cortex-R52 cores clocked at up to 800 MHz, Renesas RZ/T2M microprocessor units (MPUs) target real-time, high-precision motor control applications such as AC servo drives and industrial robots.
The RZ/T2M microprocessor also supports Ethernet with TSN and functional safety, and has been designed in such a way to reduce the number of external components in order to both decrease the BoM costs and the product size.
Purpose-built Linux security solution utilizes Moving Target Defense technology to prevent advanced cyberattacks, and eliminate performance issues and alert overload
Today, almost all software that matters is developed using open-source methods. Open-source also is changing how we build hardware with such projects as datacenter with Open Compute and chips with RISC-V. And, now at its Berlin OpenInfra Summit, the Open Infrastructure Foundation (OpenInfra) is introducing how open source can transform businesses and software projects with its Directed Funding model.
Security updates have been issued by Debian (avahi), Fedora (firefox), Oracle (grub2, python-twisted-web, shim, shim-signed, and thunderbird), Red Hat (kernel and python-twisted-web), SUSE (gcc48, go1.17, go1.18, and mariadb), and Ubuntu (e2fsprogs, linux, linux-aws, linux-aws-5.13, linux-azure, linux-azure-5.13, linux-gcp, linux-gcp-5.13, linux-hwe-5.13, linux-intel-5.13, linux-kvm, linux-oracle, linux-oracle-5.13, linux-raspi, linux, linux-aws, linux-aws-5.4, linux-azure, linux-azure-5.4, linux-azure-fde, linux-gcp, linux-gke, linux-gke-5.4, linux-gkeop, linux-gkeop-5.4, linux-hwe-5.4, linux-ibm, linux-ibm-5.4, linux-kvm, linux-oracle, linux-oracle-5.4, linux-raspi, linux-raspi-5.4, linux, linux-aws, linux-aws-hwe, linux-azure, linux-azure-4.15, linux-gcp, linux-hwe, linux-kvm, linux-oracle, linux-raspi2, linux-snapdragon, linux, linux-aws, linux-azure, linux-gcp, linux-gke, linux-ibm, linux-intel-iotg, linux-kvm, linux-lowlatency, linux-oracle, linux-raspi, linux, linux-aws, linux-kvm, linux-lts-xenial, linux-oem-5.14, linux-oem-5.17, and ntfs-3g).
CISA has added 36 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 in the "Date Added to Catalog" column, which will sort by descending dates.
Several botnets are now using exploits targeting a critical remote code execution (RCE) vulnerability to infect Linux servers running unpatched Atlassian Confluence Server and Data Center installs.
After you initiate the process of deleting your Facebook account, you’ll get a chance to revoke it within 30 days. After 30 days, Facebook will delete your account and its related information. Once it’s done, it’ll be impossible to retrieve your account or information.
To cancel your account deletion, all you need to do is to access your Facebook account within these 30 days. After you sign in, click on Cancel Deletion to continue using your account.
Facebook may take up to 90 days since the deletion process initiation to delete all your posts. However, these won’t be available to other Facebook users.
Facebook backup storage might store copies of your information even after 90 days as a part of recovery management for a disaster, data loss event, or software error. It can also keep your information for various legal purposes.
War Thunder is a free-to-play online war game from Gaijin Entertainment. It is a game committed to accuracy, with a mode that goes all-out on realistic vehicle and weapon physics, and a playerbase that is extremely invested in the minutiae of its vehicle simulations.
The War Thunder forums see many arguments about the accuracy or otherwise of particular hardware, and this weekend saw one about the French Leclerc Main Battle Tank and its variants: which at one stage, got down to the exact speed of rotation of the tank's turret. Player __RED_CROSS__ got rather annoyed (opens in new tab) with a user saying that the turret's rotation speed was 40 degrees a second, among other things, and so decided to try and win the argument by—under the title 'Sekrit Document'—posting portions of the gunner manual for the Leclerc to prove their point (thanks, UK Defence Journal).
This happened on Sunday morning and, doubtless quite pleased with their work, __RED_CROSS__ popped back into the thread several times during the day, saying things like "It took ~11 seconds for the turret to make a complete turn, so 550 mil/s (31€°) is indeed correct not 40€°. [Leclerc Serie 2 (opens in new tab)] I was in". They further went on to clarify that they were in the Serie 2.3 model, while other fans in the thread reported the documents and argued over whether they were classified or not.
Publisher Kris Millegan speaks with Whitney Webb about blackmail, organized crime and Israel, Richard Nixon and the Dulles brothers, and her upcoming book, One Nation Under Blackmail: The Sordid Union Between Intelligence and Organized Crime That Gave Rise to Jeffrey Epstein.