The 9to5Linux Weekly Roundup for August 28th, 2022, brings news about Linux's 31st birthday, Firefox 104, new Linux computers, NetworkManager 1.40, KDE Plasma 5.25 in Kubuntu 22.04 LTS, as well as all the latest distro and software releases.
Welcome to this week's Linux weekly roundup.
We had a peaceful week in the world of Linux distro and application releases, with no major release. I see it as the "calm before the storm".
May you have a wonderful week and see you in the Autumn.
We cover events and user groups that are running in Finland. This article forms part of our Linux Around The World series.
This NOAA Weather satellite setup on a Raspberry PI 4 using Raspberry OS either 32 or 64 bit was shared by TekMaker on Youtube!
Josh and Kurt talk about the recent National Defense Authorization Act that requires security vulnerabilities to be fixed. What does this mean for us, is it as bad as some people are claiming it is? It’s actually not a huge deal, for most of us it’s really just time to deal with product security.
Today we are looking at how to install Shadow PC 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.
In this video, we are looking at how to install FreeOffice on Pop!_OS 22.04.
**kile and LaTeX** , **killbots** , **kimageformats** from the Slackware **kde** package set.
So as some people already noticed, last week was an anniversary week - 31 years since the original Linux development announcement. How time flies.
But this is not that kind of historic email - it's just the regular weekly RC release announcement, and things look pretty normal. We've got various fixes all over the tree, in all the usual places: drivers (networking, fbdev, drm), architectures (a bit of everythinig: x86, loongarch, arm64, parisc, s390 and RISC-V), filesystems (mostly btrfs and cifs, minor things elsewhere), and core kernel code (networking, vm, vfs and cgroup).
And some tooling support (perf and selftests).
We've got a few known issues brewing, but nothing that looks all that scary. Knock wood.
Please give it a go,
Linus
The 6.0-rc3 kernel prepatch is out for testing.
I submitted a change to the nix package manager last week, and it got merged! It's now possible to define a bandwidth speed limit in the nix.conf configuration file.
The RPM Package Manager (RPM) is an open packaging system used in Red Hat Linux and its distributions such as CentOS and Fedora. An RPM Package contains archive files and metadata including dependencies and installs location.
An RPM package has a .rpm file format. rpm command is used to install, update, remove, verify, query, and manage RPM packages.
This tutorial will demonstrate different examples of rpm commands in RHEL-based Linux systems.
In this tutorial, we’re going to show you how to install Chrome on Ubuntu. This tutorial was tested on Ubuntu 22.04, but it will work on other Ubuntu releases and Ubuntu derivatives.
Google Chrome is one of the most popular browsers for all OSes, including Linux. Firefox is pre-installed by default on Ubuntu. If you want to install Chrome, you’ll have to do it manually, it’s not available in the Ubuntu Software center. If you need other recommendations for browsers on Linux, check out The 4 Best Linux Browsers I’ve Used in 2022 and Top 5 Most Secure Browsers for Linux
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Telegram on Linux Mint 21. For those of you who didn’t know, Telegram is the free instant messaging application that can be used to connect to friends, family, and relatives. With Telegram you can send and receive text & voice messages, multimedia files like images and videos, as well as make and receive video calls. Telegram is available for Linux, Android, Windows Phone, iOS, and macOS.
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 Telegram messenger on Linux Mint 21 (Vanessa).
If you want to get into development, one of my favorite programming languages that I’ve learned is Python. It’s a multi-paradigm language, supporting imperative, functional, procedural, and object-oriented programming. It’s wide open and can be used for practically anything, and is a go-to language for many when working in artificial intelligence or machine learning. I use it for a lot of automation, and it’s even the language that some of the testing tools that we’ve used are written in.
Python is a powerful language, and if you want to get started with it, this guide will teach you the basics. Not only will you need to install the Python binaries and ensure that it’s in your PATH, but you’ll also need something to actually write code in. You could use a full-fledged IDE (Integrated Development Environment) like PyCharm, or you could lean towards a text editor such as the pre-installed IDLE or Sublime Text 3. There are a lot of options, but this guide should kick-start you on the basics.
seq command prints a sequence of numbers in Linux. It is super-fast in generating a list of sequential numbers.
The output of seq command can be piped to various other commands for additional functionality. The seq command is also useful in for loops and bash scripts.
This article will discuss different examples of the seq command to print a sequence of numbers in the Linux system.
In a world where Valve’s Proton dominates gaming headlines, it's hard to remember that it would be nothing without the forward progress of Wine. Wine 7.16 was released this morning, breaking with its tradition of releasing every other Friday. It's the latest on the march toward 8.0 which is due out later this year. Thankfully, we don't have to wait for version 8.0 to benefit from lots of meaningful fixes.
One of Linux desktop’s most prolific — not to mention best, imo — theme makers has released a brand new GTK theme for us all to go gaga over.
Designer Vince Liuice’s latest creation is called Nephrite, and it was made available to download from Pling and from GitHub this weekend.
Nephrite maintains the high quality this theme maker is famed for, and the theme looks pixel perfect on my high resolution display, i.e. no blurry corners or pixelated edges some themes inadvertently offer.
Always one for options, Vince has made the Nephrite theme available in light, dark, and mixed versions. All come paired with a calming teal accent colour by default, making it the ideal compliment to Vince’s Colloid icon theme.
Qubes OS is an unusual project which strives to perform two difficult tasks in parallel. First, it attempts to isolate various tasks and elements of the operating system to prevent the compromising of one component from affecting other components. Second, it attempts to make this experience virtually seamless for desktop users.
The idea here is that the user should be able to use their applications in a way which allows each application (or a group of applications) to be isolated from the rest of the system. If our web browser is hijacked it shouldn't give access to our office documents, for example.
I downloaded the latest version of Qubes OS, which is provided as a 5.4GB ISO for 64-bit (x86_64) computers. Booting from this ISO displays a boot menu where we can immediately launch the system installer or run a self-check on the media and then start the install process. There is no option to launch a live desktop environment.
By default, Qubes runs Fedora software. This includes getting up and running using the Anaconda system installer. The installing experience is virtually identical to setting up Fedora 36 Workstation with the exception the default software selection uses the Xfce desktop instead of GNOME.
The Anaconda installer presents the steps we take to set up the operating system as a series of modules we can access in the order of our choosing from a hub screen. After going through the modules and (mostly) taking the defaults, the installer refused to continue. At the bottom of the page a message informed me that I'd need to complete all the steps currently marked with an alert icon. The problem was none of the modules was marked with an icon.
I went through the modules again and ran into the same warning without the ability to continue. I restarted the computer and tried again. This time I took all the defaults. This caused the partitioning module to complain, saying the automated partition layout wouldn't work. I set up partitions for booting, swap, and root. Then returned to the hub screen where I was shown the same warning about completing all marked modules before continuing, despite no modules being marked.
We are pleased to offer MX-21.2 for your use.
MX-21.2 is the second refresh of our MX-21 release, consisting of bugfixes, kernels, and application updates since our original release of MX-21. If you are already running MX-21, there is no need to reinstall. Packages are all available thru the regular update channel.
CSI Inline Volumes were introduced as an alpha feature in Kubernetes 1.15 and have been beta since 1.16. We are happy to announce that this feature has graduated to General Availability (GA) status in Kubernetes 1.25.
CSI Inline Volumes are similar to other ephemeral volume types, such as configMap, downwardAPI and secret. The important difference is that the storage is provided by a CSI driver, which allows the use of ephemeral storage provided by third-party vendors. The volume is defined as part of the pod spec and follows the lifecycle of the pod, meaning the volume is created once the pod is scheduled and destroyed when the pod is destroyed.
Flathub is the main place that you acquire Flatpaks on Linux and soon a big change is coming to the service, allowing developers to to have paid apps if they choose to do so.
So now some Debian boohoos are complaining about my blog which is aggregated at Planet KDE, directly to KDE, how nice.
[...]
Funny that those few ….. over at Debian cannot get a grip on reality and continue to witch hunt me.
And here we are: second day of the barbeque in Cambridge. Lots of food - as always - some alcohol, some soft drinks, coffee.
Lots of good friends, and banter and good natured argument. For a couple of folk, it's their first time here - but most people have known each other for years. Lots of reminiscing, some crochet from two of us. Multiple technical discussions weaving and overlapping
The Android desktop scene is relatively new, with a handful of distributions like in the early days of Linux. In theory, Android desktops should provide a new way of using your PC, with a conventional desktop harnessing the enormous Android ecosystem. That’s the idea at least. But how do they stack up really? We put the four main players to the test to decide which Android desktop is the best.
In my previous post about the repair of my Australian C64 I got as far as diagnosing that I needed a new CIA chip. The CIA chip has arrived so I thought I would try it out and see how far I get.
The CIA chip arrived and I popped it straight into the socket where the dead one originally was (the U2 socket).
Time changes, and with it, technology is evolving with swift changes with every passing day. If you are in the tech industry, you must stay in touch with all these rapid changes and the coming trends to stay up to date.
After sharing this with others, I was informed this is not the first time Firefox has been referred to as a search engine.
The seventeenth release of littler as a CRAN package just landed, following in the now sixteen year history (!!) as a package started by Jeff in 2006, and joined by me a few weeks later.
littler is the first command-line interface for R as it predates Rscript. It allows for piping as well for shebang scripting via #!, uses command-line arguments more consistently and still starts faster. It also always loaded the methods package which Rscript only started to do in recent years.
littler lives on Linux and Unix, has its difficulties on macOS due to yet-another-braindeadedness there (who ever thought case-insensitive filesystems as a default were a good idea?) and simply does not exist on Windows (yet – the build system could be extended – see RInside for an existence proof, and volunteers are welcome!). See the FAQ vignette on how to add it to your PATH. A few examples are highlighted at the Github repo, as well as in the examples vignette.
This post explains some more code fragments; concerning reading parameters from the commandline and file reading and writing. Also, some notes on string manipulation.
It would be easy to conclude that, since you’re not sure what a “front-end engineer” is — The person who styles the page or queries the data layer? The person who animates things on screen or keeps the bundler and tooling humming along? — you can’t consider yourself a “real” front-end engineer.
Webhooks are the ultimate escape hatch to systems integration. Event publishing that doesn't require you to know much about who is listening on the other end. It's trivial to create a publisher or consumer (bring your own HTTP server/client). On the surface, Webhooks seem antithetical to the rise of the cloud native – it's easier than ever to set up servers that long-poll, managed pub/sub infrastructure, or simple event queues. But the opposite might be happening.
Buildpacks promise source-to-image generation. No need to write a Dockerfile or maintain dependencies. Get started with golden configurations for languages, frameworks, and more.
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The trade-off between Dockerfiles and buildpacks is challenging for many developers to assess. We're usually much better at identifying upfront costs rather than future costs. And Dockerfiles have an initial learning curve.
One thing that was a bit weird for me in OCaml early on was how to introduce multiple let bindings (e.g. in the body of a function definition).
The Kelly criterion is a way to optimise an unlimited sequence of bets under the following circumstances: a probability p of winning each bet, a loss of a fraction a of the sum bet, a gain of a fraction b of the sum bet, and a fraction f of the current fortune as the sum bet.
If you are interested to learn more about data science, you can find more articles here finnstats.
Surprising Things You Can Do With R, R has changed the way we think about data. R has had a significant impact on a wide range of data science fields, from machine learning and artificial intelligence to data visualization and analysis.
As a result, a large number of academic experts, data scientists, and analysts employ the incredibly flexible R programming language.
R, a long-standing participant in the TIOBE index that gauges the popularity of several programming languages, is utilized by individuals from all occupational fields.
While reading solutions to the PWC, I spotted a pattern. There where plenty of .map-calls that contained only simple maths. It must not be so! Task 179-2 leans itself to use vector operations.
In ecology, r/K selection theory relates to the tradeoff organisms make between quantity and quality of offspring. Some organisms choose K-selection, i.e., to have few offspring but offer them substantial parental investment (e.g., humans, whales, elephants). Others choose r-selection, having many offspring with low probabilities of reaching adulthood (dandelions, rodents, bacteria).
Extremely high rates of incarceration in the U.S. undercut national public health and safety. The overcrowded, tight quarters in jails fuel constant risks of outbreaks. Add to that the daily movement of 420,000 guards in and out of the facilities and 30,000 newly released people who are likely to inadvertently carry the virus back to communities.
Workplace surveillance goes mobile
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Time off task is a perverse little metric; a product of run-amok capitalism’s fetishization of productivity, efficiency, and other quantifications. It’s the kind of policy that was only a dream for burgeoning companies of the industrial revolution, as they clawed for more time and yield from laborers. Now though, calculating time off task can be fully realized by using the right technologies to scrupulously track workers. For Amazon, those handheld scanners are the perfect gadgets to facilitate workplace surveillance because they are essential tools that are built into the infrastructure of the work itself: the workers must use them to scan packages. The scanners are also, conveniently, extensions of workers’ physical bodies, making the data they collect a reliable depiction of physical locations and movements—or inactivity.
The amounts are obscene. They are mind-boggling. This is profit-making like you have never seen it before. It is also profiteering from war and price gouging at our expense. Big Oil is making billions of the misery of millions.
On Friday, oil giants Exxon and Chevron reported record second quarter profits, a day after Shell’s results.
First, let’s look at Exxon. The company made USD 17.9 billion in net profit in the 2nd quarter of 2022.
We should call it out for what it is. This is blood money. This is crude capitalism at its worse.
Social inequality in Germany continues to rise at an alarming rate. As a result of the pandemic, war and high inflation, the official poverty rate climbed to 16.6 percent last year, which corresponds to 13.8 million people living in poverty. This means that for ever more people—the unemployed, single parents, low-wage workers, poor pensioners—they no longer have the resources to live on.
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“The food banks are at their limit and report to us that many people are coming to them who have previously managed to make ends meet and need help for the first time,” Brühl said. Since the food banks can barely, or no longer can, meet the demand, every third food bank has had to stop accepting entrants, according to his data. There is a shortage of food and volunteers to help everyone who asks for support.
Tafel Deutschland surveyed 962 of its member food banks in June and July, 603 of which responded. According to the results, 60 percent of the food banks have seen their customer load increase by up to 50 percent since the beginning of the year. Just under a quarter (22.6 percent) of respondents said they were now supporting 50 to 100 percent more people than before. At 16 percent of the food banks, the number of people seeking help had doubled or more than doubled.
Activists have long suggested that oppressive institutions should be abolished rather than reformed. The same could be said about labor.
A US government-funded agency that claims to promote democracy but which helps undermine governments independent of Washington has moved decisively into Britain’s media space since 2016.
In June 2021, Texas Governor Greg Abbott signed into law a bill banning the state from contracting with or investing in businesses that divest from coal, oil or natural gas companies. For Texas Railroad Commissioner Wayne Christian—one of the state’s top energy regulators—the message was clear: “Boycott Texas, and we’ll boycott you.”
Since the beginning of this year, lawmakers in Indiana, Oklahoma and West Virginia have introduced bills that read a lot like the Texas anti-divestment law, and legislators in a dozen other states have also expressed support for the legislation’s objective.
Pope Francis is traveling to Canada this week to ââ¬â¹apologize to ââ¬â¹Indigenous communities for the Roman Catholic Church’s role in ââ¬â¹the country’s notorious residential school system, ââ¬â¹Ã¢â¬â¹where thousands of Indigenous children died, and countless others were sexually and physically abused.
The visit comes after years of pleas from Indigenous leaders and leading politicians for a Vatican apology about the schools, which were designed to erase Indigenous culture and language by forcibly separating children from their families to assimilate them into Western ways.
And some Indigenous leaders say it will fill in one of the biggest remaining pieces in Canada’s efforts at reconciliation over a brutal education system that a national commission declared to be a form of “cultural genocide.”
The truth is, there have been many apologies issued by many popes.
[...]
The Catholic Church and its officials have directed, authorized, counselled and/or were complicit in the horrific physical and sexual abuse of children; subjugation, vilification and violence against women; and the deaths of millions of Indigenous peoples in Canada, the United States, Australia, New Zealand, South America and the African continent. According to recent inquiries, that abuse has continued into the present.
For some First Nation, Inuit and Métis survivors, this papal visit to Canada that begins this weekend in Alberta is an important part of their healing journey. For others, the Pope is the last person they want on their territories, as he represents a religious organization that has caused much misery around the world.
Writing. Ten years ago I had an inner urge to lay my ideas on the web, on a place I owned.
The page was initially hosted on 1.ai, a now-defunct free platform that existed way before any similar service surfaced (resurfaced). I was immensely thrilled to design everything from scratch and to add Easter eggs. Hence, the blog became my medium of expression, my badge, an integral part of my journey and progress as I joined different online communities, looking to bond over shared interests.
A blog is a persona, a blog is a canvas, a blog is a series of sketches that are often seen only by the author. As the brainstorming gets less rigid and conventional, the more enthralled and absorbed by the sentences we are. These days blogs have changed but I try to keep mine unaltered: each piece is uniquely me, not a pastiche or the echo of someone else.
I rarely spend more than 40 minutes for a blog post, the average blog post takes 20 minutes. Most of them are sharing something I fiddled with in the day or week, so the topic is still fresh for me. The content of the short articles often consists of dumping a few commands / configuration I used, and write a bit of text around so the reader knows what to expect from the article, how to use the content and what's the point of the topic.
I still think that intersectional feminism has a bigger kernel of truth than its enemies: anti-PC, gamergaters, anti-SJW, anti-woke… an old movement with many names that’s founded on misrepresentations and second-hand accounts.
There's a monster in your room. It stays awake while you sleep; it can feel you when you move; it listens to you while you dream. The monster speaks in a language you cannot see, nor hear, nor sense.
Indeed, the monster speaks faster than you can comprehend. It can make strange noises and sound exactly like your friend. This creature can and will interrupt your deep slumber. During the day it will surely make you dumber. You cannot stop checking to see if it is there. When it disappears then you might be given a scare.
Though 'tis small in scale it will perform endless deeds. At half past nine you find your mind inside its hold. Your attention is its desired feast upon which it feeds. It does not matter if it can or cannot fold.
If you aren't able to read it right now, the (overly) short summary is that she discusses playing video games as a child, ignoring the rules and intended gameplay in favour of exploring and observing the worlds they portrayed.
Reading this essay resonated strongly with my own childhood computer experiences. I'll talk about this more generally later on, but the first thing it brought to mind was the 1999 PC game "Mobil 1 Rally Championship", so I want to focus on that.
I ran the 39th installment of my quarterly old school tabletop rpg convention yesterday. It was absolutely lovely. Without question the most fun I’ve had on the con this year.
For this one I had taken the time to properly prepare a dungeon of the type I typically like. A mix of puzzles, a lot of danger which is avoidable, a fun magic item or two, and some gonzo elements.
As you may guess from the title there’s also a fair bit of humour involved.
I’m hoping to do a little write-up about the dungeon and the process of writing it, but for now I just want to share my joy over how well the two sessions played out.
Who do you like?
Earlier this summer, I was having dinner with some friends and to my surprise, they started speaking positively about some fairly well-known reactionary public voices. I didn’t wanna start a whole thing but I didn’t wanna say nothing either so I tried clearing out what I thought were misconceptions. They listened but then they asked me a question I couldn’t answer. “Sandra, who do you like? Which public figure do you approve of?”
I’m right because he says so
There’s another friend of mine who always has had a kind of “appeal to authority”–based reasoning. He’d latch on to such-and-such book or writer. We were in an argument about a project and a lot of his arguments were based around his judgments of the people involved. He’d be like: this is good because these guys are the only one in the field who can think about this stuff, that other project is bad because the people working on it are futzes who don’t know what they’re doing.
There is a script to convert mp4 files to .hv. It ran on 32-bit linux and won't work by default on 64-bit linux. Below are the steps I took to get it working.
My position is full-time remote--the company is located in a different part of the country from where I live. That is going to be a challenge for me. I worked remote for several months during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, but I found that I was more susceptible to distractions and less productive at home. This is the first time I've ever accepted a position knowing ahead of time that I would not have an office to work at.
The company is located in the America/New York time zone, while I'm located in the America/Chicago time zone. That means I'll have to log into my work PC an hour earlier than I would at my previous job. Working from home is a benefit there--I don't have to factor in travel time when considering what time to wake up.
Now that we have a working backup setup, the only thing left to try is to test a restore (and more dangerously, a reinstallation). I planned on doing a reinstall anyway, so this is a good exercise to make sure my backups work as expected.
It's been a good three years at least since I gave up my last desktop PC in favor of a cluster of Raspberry Pi's running various small services. I still have some x86_64 machines in the form of two laptops, but they run when needed rather than 24/7 like the Pi's. In that time I've discovered that provided you keep the expectations reasonable a Pi makes for a great little home server.
My little cluster until today consisted of Frodo, Samwise, Gimli and Legolas. Frodo a Caldav and Carddav service as well as serving my ebook library via Calibre. Samwise is a torrent box and sometime DNS cache. Gimli runs this capsule over both Gemini and Spartan, a Finger service and a Gitea instance. Finally, Legolas runs a web server which also proxies a few of the other services on the network. Since yesterday after an upgrade and reboot Legolas has been offline, and today I tracked the problem down to a failed ethernet connection.
Protein-packed diets add excess nitrogen to the environment through urine, rivaling pollution from agricultural fertilizers
I remembered how I had to do some digging and experimentation before I got a working filter for antenna.
My personal reason for filtering or excluding content was because there are frequent posts in languages that I do not know and wanted a way to view the list of recent posts of only the languages that I do know.
The board is 15x15, represented in simple ascii originally. It's now using unicode characters for special squares.
The board is still way too busy, and something will need to be done about that (more/better use of unicode might be the answer to that issue).
Next major "game play" step is adding turn-taking and the handling of the bag of tiles and user racks. And then I might have to hook it up to gemini. Still need a better board display, imho, for that, though.
About a year and a halve ago I decided to look for a way to explore coding in Forth and Lisp. This was the main incentive to make a serious start to learn to use Emacs. Also the fact that support for things like the GNU recutils and ledger in Emacs is much better than in Vim, helped.
Now, one and a halve year later, I am using Emacs on a daily basis.
Still I am not as efficient with Emacs as I am with Vim, but having a few decades of Vim under my belt, this is to be expected.
* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It's like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.