Bonum Certa Men Certa

Links 15/02/2023: FreeBSD 13.2 Beta, Istio 1.17, and ChromeOS on Zephyr



  • GNU/Linux

    • Desktop/Laptop

      • The Register UKChromeOS now runs on top of Linux and, er, Zephyr ...

        You probably knew Google's ChromeOS is a Linux distribution. But, now, it's running on more than Linux under the hood. I didn't, and I've been covering Chrome OS like paint since the day it arrived. Today, your newer Chromebook also depends on the open-source Zephyr Project Real-Time Operating System (RTOS). Here's Chrome OS's history and where Zephyr comes in.

        Originally, ChromeOS's beginnings were shrouded in mystery. Jeff Nelson, a former Google engineer, claimed that he created "Google OS," an ancestor to Chrome OS, which used Firefox as its browser, although it is a matter of dispute whether this project is connected to the operating system we know today.

      • XSAs released on 2023-02-14

        The Xen Project has released one or more Xen security advisories (XSAs). The security of Qubes OS is not affected. Therefore, no user action is required.

      • H2S MediaWill installing Ubuntu Linux make a laptop faster? - Linux Shout

        Then you should consider installing Ubuntu Linux distro as it may be able to help you boost your laptop performance considerably. In some situations, you will be surprised by the performance gap that could be seen in the Laptop after switching to the free Ubuntu distribution.

    • Server

      • Announcing Istio 1.17

        We are pleased to announce the release of Istio 1.17. This is the first Istio release of 2023. We would like to thank the entire Istio community for helping get the 1.17.0 release published. We would like to thank the Release Managers for this release, Mariam John from IBM, Paul Merrison from Tetrate and Kalya Subramanian from Microsoft. The release managers would specially like to thank the Test & Release WG lead Eric Van Norman (IBM) for his help and guidance throughout the release cycle. We would also like to thank the maintainers of the Istio work groups and the broader Istio community for helping us throughout the release process with timely feedback, reviews, community testing and for all your support to help ensure a timely release.

      • Istio 1.17 Upgrade Notes

        When you upgrade from Istio 1.16.x to Istio 1.17, you need to consider the changes on this page. These notes detail the changes which purposefully break backwards compatibility with Istio 1.16.x. The notes also mention changes which preserve backwards compatibility while introducing new behavior. Changes are only included if the new behavior would be unexpected to a user of Istio 1.16.x. Users upgrading from 1.15.x to Istio 1.17 should also reference the 1.16 change notes.

      • Istio 1.17.0 Change Notes

        These notices describe functionality that will be removed in a future release according to Istio’s deprecation policy. Please consider upgrading your environment to remove the deprecated functionality.

      • Red Hat OfficialHow I built a homelab with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) | Enable Sysadmin

        As a recovering sysadmin, the last thing I want is to end up being technical support at home. I often tell people that I wish I had the tools available in Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) now when I was a fresh Linux sysadmin.

    • Audiocasts/Shows

    • Kernel Space

      • The New StackDemystifying Linux Kernel Initialization - The New Stack

        Let’s first talk about how much visibility a user has into what’s happening on their system and the state of the kernel itself. The Linux kernel is constantly printing diagnostic messages to the kernel ring buffer. As the name indicates, this ring buffer is a circular buffer in which older messages get overwritten by newer ones. It prints important messages about the initialization process during initialization and boot up. Several priority levels, such as emergency, critical, error, warning and informational are supported and logged to the ring buffer.

    • Instructionals/Technical

    • WINE or Emulation

    • Games

      • Boiling SteamSteam Next Fest, February 2023: The Big Recap (24 Games Tested on Linux)

        Following our most recent tradition to cover the Steam Next Fest, we tested some of the freshest demos from the recent Steam Next Fest edition that just ended on the 13th of February 2023.
      • Godot EngineRelease candidate: Godot 4.0 RC 2

        The Godot 4.0 release is mere days away! We’ve had a first release candidate last week, and since then our contributors have been fully focused on fixing regressions and critical bugs to ensure that the upcoming 4.0 release will be a great foundation to build upon.

        The Production team has been hard at work assessing the remaining PRs and issues in the 4.0 milestone, pushing non-critical or risky changes to the 4.1 milestone, or prioritizing what could actually still be done so close to the release. Astute watchers of the 4.0 milestone’s completion ratio will have noticed a significant increase, but that doesn’t mean that all issues are being solved. Some will be fixed in time for 4.1, and cherry-picked for 4.0.x maintenance releases along the way.

        Regardless of which milestone our contributors assign to your issues, be sure to keep reporting any major or minor problem you’re having with 4.0 RC 2! Your test reports at this stage are critical for us to assess whether we can finally stamp the current development branch as “stable” and release it to all platforms.

    • Desktop Environments/WMs

      • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

        • Ubuntu HandbookKDE Plasma desktop 5.27 Released! PPA for (K)Ubuntu 22.04
          KDE Plasma desktop announced the new 5.27 release today! It’s a LTS release with support until 2024!

          Plasma 5.27 features new window tiling system. By enabling it in “System Settings > Workspace Behavior > Desktop Effects“, user can press and hold Shift key and then drag app windows to auto-resize and place them in the screen side by side.

          By pressing the Windows logo key + T will go into the tile editing mode. There user can configure to have custom tile layouts.

        • HowTo GeekThe KDE Plasma Desktop on Linux Just Got a Big Update
          KDE Plasma is one of the most popular desktop environments on Linux computers, taking inspiration from Windows and macOS and adding countless customization options on top. There’s now a new release that makes it even better.

          Just in time for Free Software Day, the KDE community has released Plasma 5.27, the latest version of the desktop environment used in operating systems like Kubuntu, KDE Neon, openSUSE, and Fedora KDE. The best improvement might be the new tiling system, which allows you to set up custom tile layouts and resize adjacent windows simultaneously. It’s much more powerful than the window tiling features in Windows, but the feature is “still in its infancy” and might not work well for everyone.

        • GamingOnLinuxKDE Plasma 5.27 released with multi-monitor & Wayland upgrades, Steam Deck updater
          KDE Plasma 5.27 sounds like a really great update to this desktop environment, the same one used on the desktop mode for the Steam Deck and my personal choice for my PC too.

          Coming in on Valentines Day and the "I Love Free Software Day" (that's apparently a thing?), it brings an absolute ton of enhancements to the desktop experience including a new introduction wizard to guide you through a first time install that might help a few confused users. There's also a window tiling system, updates to app themes, upgrades to the widgets system, adjustments to system settings so it's not so overloaded, Discover now supports full Steam Deck system upgrades and so much more.

        • Make Use OfKDE Delivers Plasma 5.27 Valentine
          The new version celebrates Free Software Day and is set to be the final KDE Plasma 5 release.

          The KDE Community has announced the release of version 5.17 of its flagship Plasma Linux desktop environment.

        • Send you talks for Linux App Summit 2023 *now*!

          Call for proposal ends this Saturday 18th of February.

          I'm sure there's lots of interesting things you have to talk about so head over tohttps://linuxappsummit.org/cfp/and press the "Submit your talk" button :)

        • KDE Plasma 5.27.0 on Fedora (via our COPR)

          There's acatchthough: you will have to use ourCOPR.

          The regular update on Fedora repositories will follow shortly, I will keep you all posted.

          Feel free to join us at ourMatrix room!.

  • Distributions and Operating Systems

    • TecAdminThe Top 10 Linux Distros for Different Use Cases

      Linux is an open-source operating system that offers a wide range of choices for users based on their needs and preferences. The beauty of Linux is that it is highly customizable, which means users can tweak the OS to fit their specific requirements. However, with so many Linux distros available, it can be overwhelming to decide which one to choose.

    • New Releases

      • LinuxiacKaOS 2023.02 Released with the Brand-New KDE Plasma 5.27
        KaOS is an independent rolling-release distribution inspired by Arch Linux and entirely focused on the KDE Plasma Desktop and related Qt Toolkit-based software.

        Although it uses Pacman as its package manager, KaOS does not rely on software repositories developed and maintained by Arch. Instead, the software is available from in-house repositories, built exclusively for 64-bit systems.

      • KaOS 2023.02

        It is with great pleasure to present to you the February release of a new stable ISO.

        For the Plasma desktop, the latest Plasma (5.27.0), KDE Gear (22.12.2), and Frameworks (5.103.0) are included. All built on Qt 5.15.8+. Among the many changes included in Plasma 5.27 are the Big Multi-monitor Refactor to make working with screens much more reliable. There is also a new fine grained control tools when the user has 3 or more screens connected. For those with a large monitor KWin has long been able to place one window on the left and one on the right. Now with Meta-T the quick tiling is launched allowing complete control of where your windows are placed. Drag windows with Shift pressed and it will stick to the tiled layout. And a new System Settings module has been added to easily control the settings for Flatpaks. Your browser does not support the video tag.

    • BSD

      • FreeBSDFreeBSD 13.2-BETA1 Now Available
        
        

        The first BETA build of the 13.2-RELEASE release cycle is now available.

        Installation images are available for:

        o 13.2-BETA1 amd64 GENERIC o 13.2-BETA1 i386 GENERIC o 13.2-BETA1 powerpc GENERIC o 13.2-BETA1 powerpc64 GENERIC64 o 13.2-BETA1 powerpc64le GENERIC64LE o 13.2-BETA1 powerpcspe MPC85XXSPE o 13.2-BETA1 armv6 RPI-B o 13.2-BETA1 armv7 GENERICSD o 13.2-BETA1 aarch64 GENERIC o 13.2-BETA1 aarch64 RPI o 13.2-BETA1 aarch64 PINE64 o 13.2-BETA1 aarch64 PINE64-LTS o 13.2-BETA1 aarch64 PINEBOOK o 13.2-BETA1 aarch64 ROCK64 o 13.2-BETA1 aarch64 ROCKPRO64 o 13.2-BETA1 riscv64 GENERIC o 13.2-BETA1 riscv64 GENERICSD

        Note regarding arm SD card images: For convenience for those without console access to the system, a freebsd user with a password of freebsd is available by default for ssh(1) access. Additionally, the root user password is set to root. It is strongly recommended to change the password for both users after gaining access to the system.

        Installer images and memory stick images are available here:

        https://download.freebsd.org/releases/ISO-IMAGES/13.2/

        The image checksums follow at the end of this e-mail.

        If you notice problems you can report them through the Bugzilla PR system or on the -stable mailing list.

        If you would like to use Git to do a source based update of an existing system, use the "releng/13.2" branch.

        A list of changes since 13.1 will be available in the releng/13.2 release notes:

        https://www.freebsd.org/releases/13.2R/relnotes/

        Please note, the release notes page is not yet complete, and will be updated on an ongoing basis as the 13.2-RELEASE cycle progresses.

        === Virtual Machine Disk Images ===

        VM disk images are available for the amd64, i386, and aarch64 architectures. Disk images may be downloaded from the following URL (or any of the FreeBSD download mirrors):

        https://download.freebsd.org/releases/VM-IMAGES/13.2-BETA1/

        BASIC-CI images can be found at:

        https://download.freebsd.org/releases/CI-IMAGES/13.2-BETA1/

        The partition layout is:

        ~ 16 kB - freebsd-boot GPT partition type (bootfs GPT label) ~ 1 GB - freebsd-swap GPT partition type (swapfs GPT label) ~ 20 GB - freebsd-ufs GPT partition type (rootfs GPT label)

        The disk images are available in QCOW2, VHD, VMDK, and raw disk image formats. The image download size is approximately 135 MB and 165 MB respectively (amd64/i386), decompressing to a 21 GB sparse image.

        Note regarding arm64/aarch64 virtual machine images: a modified QEMU EFI loader file is needed for qemu-system-aarch64 to be able to boot the virtual machine images. See this page for more information:

        https://wiki.freebsd.org/arm64/QEMU

        To boot the VM image, run:

        % qemu-system-aarch64 -m 4096M -cpu cortex-a57 -M virt \ -bios QEMU_EFI.fd -serial telnet::4444,server -nographic \ -drive if=none,file=VMDISK,id=hd0 \ -device virtio-blk-device,drive=hd0 \ -device virtio-net-device,netdev=net0 \ -netdev user,id=net0

        Be sure to replace "VMDISK" with the path to the virtual machine image.
    • Fedora Family / IBM

    • Canonical/Ubuntu Family

      • Help Net SecurityReal-time Ubuntu released, offers end-to-end security and reliability

        Canonical released real-time Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, providing a deterministic response to an external event, aiming to minimise the response time guarantee within a specified deadline.

        The new enterprise-grade real-time kernel is ideal for stringent low-latency requirements. Enterprises in industrial, telecommunications, automotive, aerospace and defence, as well as public sector and retail, can now run their most demanding workloads and develop a wide range of time-sensitive applications on the open-source operating system (OS).

        “The real-time Ubuntu kernel delivers industrial-grade performance and resilience for software-defined manufacturing, monitoring and operational tech” said Mark Shuttleworth, CEO at Canonical. “Ubuntu is now the world’s best silicon-optimised AIOT platform on NVIDIA, Intel, MediaTek, and AMD-Xilinx silicon.”

      • Manjaro Vs. Ubuntu 2023 – Which is the best Linux Version?

        If you are the kind of user who is associated with computer technology 24/7 and spend most of your time in the open-source arena then you may have worked with popular Linux distributions. Some of these are Red Hat, CentOS, Debian, Mint and Arch. Today we are comparing Manjaro Vs. Ubuntu for you.

        In spite of Linux having more than 600 distros available today; we believe that there is that one for which everyone has a soft spot. This could be due to its performance, stability, availability of software, or a certain feature that is not available in other distributions.

    • Devices/Embedded

      • CNX Software2.5Gbps SFP to RJ45 Ethernet adapter sells for $25 shipped - CNX Software

        Banana Pi has started selling an inexpensive 2.5Gbps SFP to RJ45 adapter for their Banana Pi BPI-R3 WiFi 6 router board that goes for $17.89 plus shipping ($25 shipped here) on Aliexpress.

        The BPI-R3 router includes five Gigabit Ethernet RJ45 ports as well as two 2.5GbE SFP cages, but since not everybody has equipment that takes SFP cables, they used to sell it with a $30 TP-Link adapter. The company now appears to have found a cheaper model marked “SFP-2.5G-T” module that works with their board.

    • Open Hardware/Modding

    • Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

  • Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

    • Reports

      • EDRISave the date: Freedom not Fear 1-4 September 2023

        Freedom not Fear (fnf) is an annual self-organised conference on privacy and digital rights. People from all across Europe meet and work towards more freedom in the digitalised world, plan actions against increasing surveillance and other attacks on civil rights.

      • HaikuOSHaiku Activity & Contract Report, January 2023

        As is the usual way of things, the monthly Activity Report is hereby combined with my Contract Report. Apologies for the delay in getting this one out; I had originally planned to publish it before the end of last week.

    • Web Browsers/Web Servers

      • Mozilla

        • OMG UbuntuFirefox 110 Arrives with WebGL Performance Improvements

          I’ll keep this short and sweet: a new version of Mozilla Firefox is available for Windows, macOS, and Linux (heard of that?).

          Firefox already supports importing bookmarks, history, and passwords from Microsoft Edge, Google Chrome, Chromium, and Safari but once you have the Firefox 110 update you can also import data from Opera, Opera GX, and Vivaldi too – which is handy.

    • Programming/Development

      • Red HatHow debugging Go programs with Delve and eBPF is faster

        In this article, I will explain how to use Delve to trace your Go programs and how Delve leverages eBPF under the hood to maximize efficiency and speed. The goal of Delve is to provide developers with a pleasant and efficient Go debugging experience. In that vein, this article focuses on how we optimized the function tracing subsystem so you can inspect your programs and get to root-cause analysis quicker. Delve has two different backends for its tracing implementation, one is ptrace based, while the other uses eBPF. If you’re unfamiliar with any of these terms, don’t worry, I will explain along the way.

      • Tim Brayongoing by Tim Bray €· More Monos!

        Our story thus far is here. Tl;dr: I looked at a bunch of monospace fonts and recommended a few. The piece went kind of nuts, way past 50K views as I write this, and a flood of comments here and on YCombinator, nearly all of which took the form of “You left out my favorite font, which is X!” So I harvested 14 values of X, and let’s have a look at them! I’ve enjoyed this little project enough to pay actual real money for three of these.

        The methodology is the same as last outing. For each font, I post a shot of a the Linux ls(1) man page, switch Emacs into that font, and use it to write my feelings about it. Those fonts I consider excellent advance to round two, where I assemble screenshots of them displaying code in the Goland IDE.

        In this episode: Anonymous Pro, Berkeley Mono, Cascadia Mono, Comic Mono, Courier Prime, Dank Mono, DejaVu Sans Mono, Fantasque Sans Mono, Liberation Mono, Menlo, monofur, MonoLisa, Recursive Mono Linear, and Victor Mono. Reactions of the form “But you didn’t look at X” will almost certainly fall on deaf ears.

      • Perl / Raku

      • Rust

        • GStreamer Rust bindings 0.20 / Rust Plugins 0.10 release

          Version 0.20 of the GStreamer Rust bindings was released. Together with the bindings, also version 0.10 of the GStreamer Rust plugins was released.

          As usual this release follows the latest gtk-rs 0.17 release and the corresponding API changes.

          This release features relatively few changes and mostly contains the addition of some convenience APIs, the addition of bindings for some minor APIs and various optimizations.

          As part of the optimizations there will be a lot fewer temporary allocations with the new version (especially for NUL-terminated strings), and improved code generation which does not only improve performance but also reduces the size of the resulting binaries considerably. Various GStreamer plugins saw size reductions of 15-20%.

          The new release also brings a lot of bugfixes, most of which were already part of the 0.19.x bugfix releases.

  • Leftovers

    • YLERussian shoppers take Norway's Schengen shortcut to Finland

      Finland closed the Russian border due to the attack on Ukraine last year, but that has not reduced the flow of Russian shoppers arriving from Norway. The Finnish Customs agency is unable to intervene as Norway is in the Schengen area.

    • teleSURSeveral Earthquake Survivors Rescued After Over 204 Hours

      A€ German risk analysis company€ warned that the final death toll could be between 75,000 and 90,000.

    • teleSURTürkiye-Syria Quake: Death Toll Tops 35,000

      The€ U.S. sanctions impede and delay the delivery of humanitarian aid to earthquake-hit Syria.

    • New YorkerAlways Something There to Remind Me

      Burt Bacharach’s complex, existential pop.

    • Gregory HammondWhat Is Success?

      Success is different for everyone, and it changes depends on where you are in life. The very definition of success actually is “a favourable or desired outcome” which can change very often. Your communication style can also affect your success.

    • David RosenthalSybil Defense

      Because a system's Nakamoto coefficient is variable, somewhat difficult to measure and likely to be an over-estimate, the claim that a system is "decentralized" is always subjective.

      There is a much more useful, completely objective criterion. Participation in a system either is, or is not subject to permission from some authority, and this can be confirmed by the experiment of trying to participate without asking permission.

      Permissionless systems can claim some advantages, but they suffer from some serious disadvantages. Chief among them is the need to defend against "Sybil attacks". Below the fold I discuss Sybil attacks, the defense against them, and the implications for the systems that adopt this defense.

  • Gemini* and Gopher

    • Personal

      • 🔤SpellBinding: GILNYWU Wordo: ANGLE
      • Progressively impatient

        As I get older, I notice something in myself: a certain impatience. With well intentioned people who never seem to learn. With people who claim to be on the right side of things, but who do nothing. With people who think that change is something that just happens, somehow, if only we think the right things. With liberal "progressives."


* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It's like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.



Recent Techrights' Posts

Security and blobs, by Alex Oliva (GNU Linux-Libre)
Reprinted with permission from Alex Oliva
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First speech of Chanellor Hitler, Andreas Tille & Debian denounce Branden Robinson
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Over at Tux Machines...
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IRC Proceedings: Sunday, February 22, 2026
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IRC logs for Saturday, February 21, 2026
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Measuring the Growth of Our Mission and Community
Something between experiment and prototype
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On The Web, XBox Already a Dying Breed
Down to about 0.05% on large machines, based on statCounter [...] Microsoft will never publicly admit or say how many billions it lost on the XBox
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Stay tuned for what comes next
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Waggener Edstrom/Frank Shaw Lied, There Are Definitely Microsoft Layoffs
Microsoft never issued a formal statement, it made allusions by proxy
Microsoft-Controlled Media With Embargo and Press Operatives
This won't be the last example of media manipulation for narrative control or face-saving "damage control"
Slop Hype Makes Our Core Technology Less Reliable and Far Less Resilient (We Pay for the Catastrophe That Follows)
Only slop-free projects can be trusted
Going for 1,000 (Days of Uptime)
universal records are vastly better
Firefox is No-Go in China, Not Even 1% "Market Share" Anymore
Given Mozilla's utterly rubbish marketing these days (politics over technical aspects), set aside the cheerleading for slop, there's hardly a chance of Mozilla Firefox reaching or exceeding 10% again
EPO "Cocaine Communication Manager" - Part III - It's in His Eyes
Workers are free to draw their own conclusions
Links 21/02/2026: Tensions Over Iran and Illegal Cheeto Tariffs, Presidential Approval Sags
Links for the day
Links 21/02/2026: "Moving Away From Cloudflare", Many Layoffs or Shutdowns in Games (Including XBox/Microsoft)
Links for the day
GNU Linux-libre is a Grown-Up Today
"before that, every distro that wanted to respect its users' freedom had to remove itself all of the binary blobs that were distributed as part of the kernel Linux's so-called sources"
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Friday, February 20, 2026
IRC logs for Friday, February 20, 2026
Gemini Links 21/02/2026: "The Evil of Action" and Slop Bots Causing Great Harm Online (Not Just the Web)
Links for the day