Pine64, makers of ARM-based, tinker-friendly gadgets, is making the PineTab 2, a sequel to its Linux-powered tablet that mostly got swallowed up by the pandemic and its dire global manufacturing shortages.
The PineTab 2, as described in Pine64's "December Update," is based around the RK3566, made by RockChip. Pine64 based its Quartz64 single-board system on the system-on-a-chip (SoC), and has all but gushed about it across several blog posts. It's "a dream-of-a-SoC," writes Community Director Lukasz Erecinski, a "modern mid-range quad-core Cortex-A55 processor that integrates a Mali-G52 MP2 GPU. And it should be ideal for space-constrained devices: it runs cool, has a variety of I/O options, solid price-to-performance ratio, and "is genuinely future-proof." While Linux support was scarce early on, development for RK3566 is "booming," and it's now a prime candidate for mobile operating systems, Erecinski writes.
As companies undergo the shift to Kubernetes, security must be considered throughout the entire data lifecycle for IT teams who are constantly facing potential data breaches, delays, and inadequate security features that cannot easily be fixed: 94% of DevOps professionals experienced at least one Kubernetes security incident in the past year.
As Kubernetes poses unique and complex challenges that leave many exposed to outside threats, developers must work to ensure their applications are safeguarded from outside risks.
A Quick Overview BackBox Linux 8.
What disgusted Alex about Disqus, and how he replaced it with a Self-Hosted solution, a hot HDHomeRun tip, and an update on Chris' hunt for the perfect notes app.
The Steam Deck isn't perfect, yet. We need to be honest with ourselves about what works and what's broken.
After cleaning up the radv stuff I decided to go back and dig into the anv support for H264.
The current status of this work is in a branch[1]. This work is all against the current EXT decode beta extensions in the spec.
This contains an initial implementation of H264 Intel GPUs that anv supports. I've only tested it on Kabylake equivalents so far. It decodes some of the basic streams I've thrown at it from ffmpeg. Now this isn't as far along as the AMD implementation, but I'm also not sure I'm programming the hardware correctly. The Windows DXVA API has 2 ways to decode H264, short and long. I believe but I'm not 100% sure the current Vulkan API is quite close to "short", but the only Intel implementations I've found source for are for "long". I've bridged this gap by writing a slice header parser in mesa, but I think the hw might be capable of taking over that task, and I could in theory dump a bunch of code. But the programming guides for the hw block are a bit vague on some of the details around how "long" works. Maybe at some point someone in Intel can tell me :-)
The upcoming LibreOffice 7.5 release is loaded with features and improvements across modules. It’s currently undergoing beta testing. The changes includes feature updates, bug fixes, Microsoft Office compatibility, export features, macro programming improvements and many more.
In this article I will brief about some of the important visual updates that may impact your day-to-day workflow.
This article lists the top 10 best Ubuntu apps for different use cases in 2022.
If you plan to migrate to Linux permanently, you should be happy knowing that there are thousands of applications that can compete with commercial or paid applications. Also, if you are a Windows user and using Linux first time, then you may not hear of those apps.
Hence, in this article series, we are highlighting a set of Ubuntu apps at a time to increase collaboration and awareness among the user base.
AlmaLinux is well on its way to becoming one of the most popular drop-in replacements for CentOS/RHEL. Anyone who has used CentOS will immediately be familiar with the operating system. Any admin who’s not used CentOS will find it as solid a platform as any other for enterprise-level computing.
Although the installation of AlmaLinux is just as simple as any other server-ready operating system, you might find yourself at a loss as to what to do upon the first login.
Kubernetes namespaces are a means to divide resources between users and teams so there’s no cross-pollination or confusion about what belongs to what and which deployments go where. Namespaces are a great way to spread those resources across your teams and projects.
Have an important task to do in next few hours, or you have to write something down hurriedly? Here an extension allows to write one thing into the top-bar in Ubuntu, Fedora, and other Linux with GNOME Desktop.
It’s ‘One Thing‘, a gnome shell extension allows to write any word into top panel, to remind you something important!
The second edition of Designing with LibreOffice, by Bruce Byfield and Jean Hollis Weber, is now available.
Today we are looking at how to install GNOME Mines, a clone of Minesweeper, on a Chromebook.
Hello, friends. In this post, you will learn how to know which ports are in use on Linux. This as a sysadmin can be easy, but it can always help to solve a problem or two.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Zlib on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, The Zlib package is a popular data compression library that is used by many programs and libraries. If you are developing software that requires the Zlib library, or if you are using a program that depends on it, you will need to install it on your Ubuntu system. Zlib is also a crucial component of many software platforms, including Linux, macOS, and iOS.
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 Zlib on Ubuntu 22.04 (Jammy Jellyfish). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 18.04, 16.04, and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint.
This guide will walk you through each step of installation of VirtualBox 7, a widely-used and popular full virtualizer app, on Linux Mint 21.
VirtualBox 7 is a popular virtualization software that allows users to run multiple operating systems on a single physical host. With its latest release, VirtualBox 7, users can now take advantage of even more features and enhancements.
This guide will show you how to install VirtualBox 7 on Linux Mint, a Ubuntu-based Linux distribution known for its user-friendliness, reliability, and great support. So, whether you are a beginner or an experienced user, this guide will provide the steps to set it up on your Mint system successfully.
If you program in C or C++ using Linux, the compilation process is going to be handled by the GCC, aka the GNU project C and C++ compiler.
And as always, you can use flags to extend the functionality.
So let's look at some of the most important GCC flags.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Google Chrome on Rocky Linux 9. For those of you who didn’t know, Google Chrome is a web browser developed by Google. It is known for its speed, security, and support for various websites and web standards. The browser is available for Linux, macOS, iOS, and also for Android, where it is the default browser. Some of the features of Google Chrome include the ability to search and navigate directly from the address bar, support for extensions and add-ons, and a range of tools and options for customizing the browser to suit your needs. Overall, Google Chrome is a popular choice for many people looking for a fast, reliable, and secure web browser.
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 Google Chrome web browser on Rocky Linux. 9.
This brief guide explains what is ramfetch, how to install ramfetch in Linux, and how to display Memory information using ramfetch in Linux operating systems.
Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) is an important security feature for web applications. It allows web applications to use resources from other domains while preventing malicious access. In this article, we’ll look at how to enable CORS in Nginx.
We are excited to announce that we have added a new merchandise provider for the Rocky Linux project - HelloTux! This partnership will expand the options available for our community to show their support for Rocky Linux with high-quality t-shirts, hoodies, polo shirts,1 and other swag.
Located in Hungary, HelloTux is positioned to provide great shipping prices for Rocky Linux community members in Europe. They have a long history of working with open source projects and are dedicated to providing top-notch embroidered merchandise, using only free and open source software
The popular lightweight desktop environment XFCE4 got a new major release after 2 years of development.
The new release, XFCE 4.18, focuses on improving its Thunar file manager. They include image preview, Undo/Redo option, customize toolbar, highlight files with different background and filename colors.
In the List View mode, it shows how many files contained for directories, and supports for displaying ‘file creation date’ column.
The Xfce developers worked for nearly two years to come out with 4.18, the last major release being 4.16 in December 2020. The developers seem to have been taking their time in polishing new features.
"Our team added multiple nice new features, did a gazillion of bug fixes and did various minor improvements. Finally, all that is going to be released for your pleasure," Xfce's announcement page said.
Ah, working with more than one screen, nice and convenient, but always has been the scourge of usability, due to broken hardware and software, on every platform you can imagine. And yes, on Plasma we are notorious to have several problems with regard to multi screens, which spurred many bug reports.
For Plasma 5.27 we did a big refactor on how the screens are managed (and how they are mapped to desktops and panels) which hopefully should solve many of those issues, creating a much more predictable experience, both for “fixed” multi screen setups (like a setup at your desk) and “on the go” (like attaching a projector at a conference).
Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from December 09 to December 16.
Tumbleweed is changing course once again, but it's due to popular demand, and it means broader compatibility for more people. Saying that, it's looking for someone to help maintain its 32-bit support.
Back in November, the openSUSE project announced that it was changing the minimum CPU requirement for Tumbleweed on x86-64 to version 2 of the instruction set – as well as dropping support for x86-32 machines.
This would bring Tumbleweed into line with the requirements of its next-gen enterprise OS, currently available as a prototype called ALP. There's a summary of the issue on the project's website. However, following an outcry from openSUSE users, the plan has changed… again. It's still dropping the x86-32 edition, but it's not going to switch to requiring second-generation x86-64 chips.
The openSUSE Board Election 2022 ran for 15 days — starting on 1 December until 15 December. Electronic voting in the election ended at 23h59 UTC on 15 December.
In the early hours of Friday 16 December the results were computed and emailed to all voters. The results were also publicly announced on the project's mailing list.
There were 544 eligible voters in the election and 218 voters have cast their votes.
We’re slowly reaching the end of the year, and some people have less time for openSUSE, as the holiday season is upon us. Others use their free time from work to contribute more time to openSUSE. In any case, we’re not seeing any slowdown just yet and Tumbleweed keeps moving, again with 7 snapshots released during this week (1209…1215).
Cockpit is the modern Linux admin interface. We release regularly.
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Right-to-left language support has been enabled for languages that require it. When selecting a RTL language from the list, the layout will shift to be right-aligned.
We have also started modifying Cockpit and PatternFly to work better with RTL languages. However, there are still some alignment and spacing issues. We will continue to work to fix the more obvious problems.
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)!
Fedora Linux 35 reached end of life on Tuesday.
I have weekly office hours on Wednesdays in the morning and afternoon (US/Eastern time) in #fedora-meeting-1. Drop by if you have any questions or comments about the schedule, Changes, elections, or anything else. See the upcoming meetings for more information.
A discussion on the debian-project mailing list caught my attention to an Italian word meaning something like “would you be so kind to please go somewhere else?”, but in a more direct and vulgar manner. I then used http://codesearch.debian.net to study its usage more in detail.
Last year, we officially re-launched the “Snapcrafters” initiative. We’re a community of volunteers who build and maintain unofficial snap packages. Although snaps make it easy for developers to publish their software directly to users, some of them don’t (yet) do this. Here is where Snapcrafters come in: we build snap packages, update them, and work with developers to eventually hand over these packages into their care.
Throughout the year, we’ve been busy improving the snaps and our tooling around the project. This post summarises some of the highlights.
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Are you interested in helping out? Would you like to improve software used by hundreds of thousands of people? Then we’re happy to have you! The best part is, you don’t even need much knowledge about snaps!
For example, one of the ways you can contribute is by improving and updating the metadata of our snaps. These are, for example, the description of a snap, screenshots and useful links. This helps users find the applications, figure out what they do and know where they can get help. We can definitely use help in improving this information for our snaps. Most of this metadata is stored in the snapcraft.yaml file itself.
We’re ages past the time when a YouTuber could get away with sloppy camera work. If someone wants to achieve any level of success making videos today, they need near-professional camera equipment. But even that equipment isn’t enough if it’s still used for static shots. Many makers build sliders and other rigs, but James Bruton skipped those small steps and jumped straight to a versatile robotic camera operator.
Bruton wanted to capture dynamic videos at any time of day or night without hiring a live-in camera operator and this robot is the result. It can drive around and has complete control over the mounted DSLR camera. It can follow pre-programmed movement patterns, can use tracking to stay focused on Bruton, or a combination of the two to change perspective while staying centered on Bruton. It can also automatically zoom in and out based on motion to ensure that anything interesting is in frame. Bruton can even trigger additional features using foot switches, such as raising a robotic thumbs-up into the frame.
Much to the consternation of those of us who write for a living, AI writers are gaining traction as their capabilities increase. The hot name in the AI content creation industry at the moment is ChatGPT, which is powered by OpenAI’s GPT-3 engine. With the right input and direction, GPT-3 can output some impressive writing. To harness that power in a co-writing assistant, Arvind Sanjeev built the Ghostwriter.
Ghostwriter is a vintage Brother electric typewriter retrofitted with modern hardware that lets it access and utilize the GPT-3 API (application programming interface). The user can type a query onto paper, such as a writing prompt or question, and GPT-3 will return a result that also prints out on the paper. By guiding GPT-3 with suitable prompts, the user can receive as much AI-generated text as they like. They might then edit that text for publication, use it as-is, or showcase the manuscript as an art piece.
Nearly every manufacturer uses a machine at some point in their process, and each of those machines is almost guaranteed to contain at least one motor. In order to maintain uptime and efficiency, these motors must always work correctly, as even a small breakdown can lead to disastrous effects. Predictive maintenance aims to achieve this goal while also not going overboard in trying to prevent them entirely by combining sensors with predictive techniques that can schedule maintenance when a failure is probable.
Shebin Jose Jacob’s solution utilizes the Arduino Nano 33 BLE Sense, along with its built-in microphone, to capture audio and predict when a motor is about to fail. He achieved this by first creating a new Edge Impulse project and gathering samples for four classes of sound: OK, anomaly 1, and anomaly 2, as well as general background noise. After designing an impulse and training a classification model on the samples, he was able to achieve an impressive accuracy of about 95% on the test samples.
As the SolarWinds and Log4j hacks show, vulnerabilities in open source software used in application development can open doors for attackers with vast consequences. A new study looks at the open source community’s efforts to “credit-rate” the risk.
A small audience of WordPress contributors, developers, and extenders gathered on December 15 for the annual State of the Word keynote from WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg. Those who could not join in person joined via livestream or one of 33 watch parties held across 11 countries, with more than 500 RSVPs.
The Qubes OS Project is grateful to have been selected as one of the beneficiaries of this year’s Proton charity fundraiser alongside so many other wonderful organizations. The continued support of the privacy community means the world to us! For details about the fundraiser and how you can participate, please see the official Proton blog post: The 2022 Lifetime Account Charity Fundraiser has started!
Xojo, Inc., developers of Xojo, a cross-platform application development environment for macOS, Windows, Linux, Web, Raspberry Pi, iOS and soon Android, today announced the immediate release of Xojo 2022 Release 4. This latest update adds 250+ improvements, including the ability to build applications for Linux ARM 64, as well as Linux Dark Mode support for Xojo. It also includes more than 100 bug fixes to the Integrated Development Environment (IDE) and Framework, increasing quality and reliability, and 18 new features.
Incoming support for Modula-2 in GCC, and a new Gitlab repository for its descendant Oberon, shows that the Wirthian family of programming languages remains livelier than you might think.
Modula-2 is what Pascal inventor Niklaus Wirth did next. Modula-2 is the direct descendant of Pascal, aimed at more modular (the clue's right there in the name), and more parallel, programming. Part of the idea was to make it easier to break programs up into discrete chunks, so that they can be compiled, and run, separately.
The Material Browser was updated to represent the available textures alongside the materials. Adding and using textures is now easy and intuitive thanks to the new Texture Editor and the textures section in the Material Browser. Adding a light probe from a texture, as you can see in the screenshot, is just one context menu click away.
We will be updating the Content Library in upcoming releases of Qt Design Studio. Stay tuned.
How to turn your Figma design into a working control set without any coding!
Here at Qt we are big fans of Figma. Their Design System approach comes the closest to the kind of development thinking required to build an full production application UI in Qt Design Studio. Because of this large conceptual overlap and the well defined API provided for the Figma files we can capture and convert much of the design process into QML via our Qt Bridge exporter plugin.
But until now there was a disconnect, an important missing piece of the puzzle, Controls.
Sure, you could design and export the visual parts of your Controls but in the end you would still have to somehow convert this design into a working control, usually replicating only part of the functionality that Qt Quick Controls has available as standard.
Ok-wrapping as needed in today’s Rust is a significant distraction, because there are multiple ways to do it. They are all slightly awkward in different ways, so are least-bad in different situations. You must choose a way for every fallible function, and sometimes change a function from one pattern to another.
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Ever since I read withoutboats’s 2020 article about fehler, I have been using it in most of my personal projects.
For Reasons I recently had a go at eliminating the dependency on fehler from Hippotat. So, I made a branch, deleted the dependency and imports, and started on the whack-a-mole with the compiler errors.
After about a half hour of this, I was starting to feel queasy.
After an hour I had decided that basically everything I was doing was making the code worse. And, bizarrely, I kept having to make individual decisons about what idiom to use in each place. I couldn’t face it any more.
After sleeping on the question I decided that Hippotat would be in Debian with fehler, or not at all. Happily the Debian Rust Team generously helped me out, so the answer is that fehler is now in Debian, so it’s fine.
For me this experience, of trying to convert Rust-with-#[throws] to Rust-without-#[throws] brought the Ok wrapping problem into sharp focus.
Security updates have been issued by Debian (firefox-esr, libde265, php7.3, and thunderbird), Fedora (firefox, freeradius, freerdp, and xorg-x11-server), Oracle (firefox, prometheus-jmx-exporter, and thunderbird), Red Hat (firefox, nodejs:16, prometheus-jmx-exporter, and thunderbird), and SUSE (ceph and chromium).
Apple has confirmed that an iPhone software update it released two weeks ago fixed a zero-day security vulnerability that it now says was actively exploited.
The update, iOS 16.1.2, landed on November 30 and rolled out to all supported iPhones — including iPhone 8 and later — with unspecified “important security updates.”
In a disclosure to its security updates page on Tuesday, Apple said the update fixed a flaw in WebKit, the browser engine that powers Safari and other apps, which if exploited could allow malicious code to run on the person’s device. The bug is called a zero-day because the vendor is given zero day’s notice to fix the vulnerability.
Apple said security researchers at Google’s Threat Analysis Group, which investigates nation state-backed spyware, hacking and cyberattacks, discovered and reported the WebKit bug.
The SHA-1 algorithm, one of the first widely used methods of protecting electronic information, has reached the end of its useful life, according to security experts at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). The agency is now recommending that IT professionals replace SHA-1, in the limited situations where it is still used, with newer algorithms that are more secure.
SHA-1, whose initials stand for “secure hash algorithm,” has been in use since 1995 as part of the Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) 180-1. It is a slightly modified version of SHA, the first hash function the federal government standardized for widespread use in 1993. As today’s increasingly powerful computers are able to attack the algorithm, NIST is announcing that SHA-1 should be phased out by Dec. 31, 2030, in favor of the more secure SHA-2 and SHA-3 groups of algorithms. “We recommend that anyone relying on SHA-1 for security migrate to SHA-2 or SHA-3 as soon as possible,” said NIST computer scientist Chris Celi.
The Samba Team has released security updates to address vulnerabilities in multiple versions of Samba. An attacker could exploit some of these vulnerabilities to take control of an affected system.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Food and Drug Administration Office of Criminal Investigations (FDA OCI), and the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) have released a joint Cybersecurity Advisory (CSA) detailing recently observed incidents of criminal actors using business email compromise (BEC) to steal shipments of food products and ingredients valued at hundreds of thousands of dollars. The joint CSA analyzes the common tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) utilized by criminal actors to spoof emails and domains to impersonate legitimate employees and order goods that went unpaid and were possibly resold at devalued prices with labeling that lacked industry standard “need-to-knows” (i.e., necessary information about ingredients, allergens, or expiration dates).
Before we get into the response, it is important to highlight certain issues with the consultation process for the draft Digital Personal Data Protection Bill, 2022. The consultation process requires interested participants to register on the MyGov website in order to be able to provide comments. This is a significant hurdle as many individuals may not want to register on a government portal for this exercise. Further, the feedback can only be given for specific chapters or clauses in the DPDPB, 2022 and each specific response has a character limit of 2500 characters. This significantly restricts the ability to provide in-depth feedback on the provisions of the Bill as well as feedback which may not be specific to a particular clause.
This week in the Weekly News Roundup, Social Media is under attack for PI tracking, the FBI crime sharing database is hacked, and TikTok study shows self-harm videos shown to kids in less than 30 minutes.
A global community of activists is taking part today in the Defective by Design campaign's 16th annual International Day Against DRM (IDAD) to protest use of Digital Restrictions Management (DRM), a widespread technology that places unethical restrictions on how people access digital media. Though from different backgrounds, countries, and perspectives, participants in the campaign share the common cause of opposing DRM in all of its forms. This year's theme was the freedom to share.
Led by the Free Software Foundation (FSF), the Defective by Design campaign is mobilizing activists to spread awareness on the predominating influence of DRM over the public's consumption of media. The campaign drew attention to the need for "DRM-free" media by asking their supporters to share DRM-free works with a friend or family member. This was joined by a general challenge to go a "day without DRM" as a way to raise awareness for publishers and storefronts that intentionally refrain from using it, such as those cataloged by the campaign's Guide to DRM-free Living.
On a recent episode of Ropes & Gray’s Talkin’ Trade podcast, my colleagues and I mentioned a few current developments...
Ahm where to blog to? Originally there was blogspot before that became a pain to use. I switched over to Wordpress for a number of years. It is heavyweight, and cumbersome to use for technical writing. I briefly switched over to blogging on Gemini. It is well-suited to technical writing, but I did not want to have too many files on my system. I tried bearblog, which is pretty reasonable, but very confusing to navigate. Medium is the last one I tried, and I am using that. It is fairly simple, accomodates code well, but not quotes. Which brings me to brain rewiring ... So, in the side panel "More from Medium" as such links as "4 Books So Powerful, They Can Rewire Your Brain." Clickbait much? "10 Little Behaviours that Attract People to You." Actually, I know what my problem is: I score way high on the disagreeableness scale. According to a Stars Wars test I did, I have the disagreeableness of Emperor Palpatine. Oh dear. Then there's "How I have Made $280k Selling Spreadsheets on Etsy." I am unemployed at the moment, so as it happens, I am open to the idea of making money plying my computer skills. But I am not so open that my brain has fallen out. In other words, I have not clicked on the article. Ah the modern internet. The hustle. Always the hustle.
I like vintage Coca-Cola ads, and a lot of our modern view of Santa Clause comes from said vintage Coca-Cola ads, but I'm not sure what I make of this holiday display from the neighborhood:
[Huge, three-panel display of a vintage Coca-Cola Santa Ad flanked by a life-sized Santa on the left, and maybe a yeti on the right, in the front yard of a house in the neighborhood] Either Sasquatch is planning an Artic expedition, and thus shilling for Coke for funding, or else he's really old and trying to raise retirement funds by shilling for Coke. In either case, we know Santa has been a sell out for mostly a century now. [1]Ãâ¦
My wife and I play a lot of board games together: a relatively new pastime for me, as growing up I rarely played them after my elementary school days. She owned several board games already before we got together, and we've more than doubled our collection in the intervening years.
Board games undoubtedly have their merits: they're creative, they're tactile, they encompass a wide range of game genres, and once printed and packaged, they consume no further resources. However, they have a downside: any given board game can often only support one style of game. If one wants to play a different genre, one usually must purchase a different board game.
* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It's like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.