No, Macs have never been a serious gamer’s first choice. But when even Linux-based systems are climbing past Apple’s computers on Steam’s hardware list, you start to wonder.
Steam’s monthly hardware report shows that more gamers are using Linux devices than Apple Macs, to the tune of 1.96 versus 1.84 percent (the vast majority of course run Windows PCs). The explanation? Probably Valve’s own Steam Deck gaming handheld. The breakout device runs on Valve’s custom Linux-based Steam OS and intensely marketed (and praised) over the past year.
These are two areas where parental control software plays an important role in enabling parents to protect their family from undesirable content, and to make sure that the internet does not become an addiction. There are very few Linux content control solutions which are high quality and maintained.
Here’s our verdict captured in a legendary LinuxLinks-style ratings chart.
So you’ve been using your Linux terminal for your regular chores, be it web development, systems administration, or simply browsing files in your system. But have you ever thought about having fun with it? Well, if you’re looking for a break from the mundane, you are at the right place.
Here are 10 fun and quirky things you can do right on your Linux terminal. As a bonus, these activities also help to sharpen your Linux skills!
What is this mysterious protocol? Who uses it and what is its story?
This story is a winding one, beginning in 1981. Kermit is, to the best of my knowledge, the oldest actively-maintained software package with an original developer still participating. It is also a scripting language, an Internet server, a (scriptable!) SSH client, and a file transfer protocol.
And my first use of it was talking to my HP-48GX calculator over a 9600bps serial link. Yes, that calculator had a Kermit server built in.
But let’s back up and talk about serial ports and Modems.
For more or less historical reasons, we currently use NFS v3 to mount filesystems from our fileservers. We're likely going to (slowly) move over to NFS v4 (after successful experiments), so I've been working on various preparations for that, such as making sure our automounter system doesn't specifically force NFS v3 but instead leaves it up to the system to pick a version. In the process of this, I've discovered a surprise.
On Linux, NFS v4 mounts have the filesystem type 'nfs4', not 'nfs'; the 'nfs' filesystem type is for NFS v3 (and NFS v2, if you're using that, which you probably shouldn't be). Linux's normal 'mount' program will accept 'mount -t nfs ...' and do a NFS v4 mount if the server supports it, but listing mounts with 'mount -t nfs' will only list NFS v3 ones, and the actual filesystem type in /proc/mounts (aka /proc/self/mounts) and other things is 'nfs4'.
A good reason to use package managers when installing software is that it normally just works. And while that's a very compelling reason, I still think developers should first try installing software from source when possible. The two main advantages of installing from source are: learning and control. Control over how the package is built, what's included, where it goes, how it's managed and the flexibility to apply patches and versions possibly not available in your package manager.
Now, I'll be quick to admit that you probably shouldn't spend a huge amount of time trying to install something from source. For many packages the best case scenario is a complicated process requiring specific build tools and dependencies with their own complications. The worst case scenario is poor or lacking documentation and no idea how to even get started.
But, you can try.
Prometheus expressions act as filters, or to put it another way, we're doing set operations. What an alert rule expression really yields is some number of individual time series, each with its own set of labels. Each time series will become an alert (with its labels taken from the time series), either a pending alert or a firing alert depending on whether or not the alert rule has a 'for:' (see my entry on delays and timings for alerts). As long as the alert rule expression continues to produce that time series, the associated alert will stay active. When the alert rule expression stops producing that time series, the associated alert goes away (unless you've set 'keep_firing_for' on it).
I want to show you how to get started with Fail2Ban to keep your Linux servers more secure. For this blog post, I've used Ubuntu 22.04 LTS as a reference and will use it to secure my SSH service with iptables as the firewall. I assume that you already installed it on your system.
In the rapidly evolving realm of cloud computing, the Nextcloud Desktop application stands as a beacon for those seeking a harmonized approach to data management and synchronization. This guide aims to walk readers through the meticulous steps required to install the Nextcloud Desktop client, employing Fedora’s esteemed RPM repository.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Gitea on Fedora 38. For those of you who didn’t know, Gitea is a lightweight, self-hosted Git service that allows teams and individuals to collaborate efficiently and manage version control for their software projects.
In today’s era of gaming, diverse platforms and an assortment of game titles have made managing one’s gaming library a crucial aspect for enthusiasts. Enter Lutris, a comprehensive game manager tailored for Linux. This guide will demonstrate how to install Lutris on Fedora Linux utilizing Fedora’s RPM repository.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Git on Fedora 38. For those of you who didn’t know, Git revolutionized version control systems with its distributed nature, allowing developers to work offline and collaboratively on the same project.
In Linux, the head command is a commonly used command-line utility that allows you to view the top portion of a large file or the output of the command.
OpenNMS, also known as “Open Network Management System”, is a free, open-source, and powerful network management and network monitoring solution. An enterprise network management system monitors and manages various services and devices from a central location. OpenNMS can be installed on Windows and Linux-based operating systems.
The ps command in Linux stands at the forefront of powerful command-line utilities, offering critical insights for system administration and monitoring. Short for “process status”, it delivers detailed information about the currently running processes, including their process identification numbers (PIDs).
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Grafana on Fedora 38. In today’s data-driven world, the ability to visualize and analyze data effectively is paramount. Grafana, an open-source tool, empowers users to create stunning visualizations and monitor systems with ease.
Learn how to easily install Java on Debian 12 (Bookworm) with our step-by-step guide. Enhance your system for powerful Java applications!
Discord is one of the most popular chatting software that gamers use. Even though Discord was created mainly for gamers, nowadays many companies use Discord for different purposes.
There are several different methods to install Discord on Debian 12.
Paru is a new AUR helper that you can use to install and download packages from AUR repository on Arch Linux.
Paru is based off Yay. However, the difference is that, Paru is written in Rust, while Yay is written in go.
The Linux operating system is admired for its robust command-line utilities, offering users profound flexibility and control. One such utility is the rmdir command. The rmdir command, an abbreviation for “remove directory”, is an essential tool for users aiming to maintain an organized filesystem.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Laravel on Debian 12. For those of you who didn’t know, Laravel has emerged as one of the leading PHP frameworks for web development, offering an elegant and efficient approach to building web applications.
In Linux, the “cd command” is pivotal for navigating the open-source operating system’s vast filesystem. This seemingly simple command, standing for “change directory,” is a cornerstone of user navigation and file management, showcasing the depth and power of Linux’s command-line utilities.
Linux, a versatile open-source operating system, offers various command-line utilities for various tasks. The sed command, standing for Stream Editor, holds a significant place among these utilities. It’s specifically tailored for parsing and transforming text in a data stream or file.
Discord is a popular communication platform designed for gamers, but it has since become widely used for various purposes, including business, education, and personal communication.
Git is an incredibly powerful and popular version control system (VCS) developers worldwide use to manage and track changes in their codebases. It was created by Linus Torvalds, the same person behind the Linux operating system, in 2005.
If you’re a Linux Mint user seeking an alternative to mainstream Internet suites, SeaMonkey could be your next destination. This integrated Internet application suite might not get the same buzz as Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox, but it has a unique charm that’s all its own.
How to Use tar Command in Linux Objective The objective of this article is to explain various steps of creating backup data...
If you are looking at how to make a directory in Linux then you are at the right place...
In a previous tutorial I explained how to create a Linux bootable USB drive in macOS.
Glorious eggrolls! There's another release of GE-Proton available for Linux desktop and Steam Deck, so here's the details on what's changed. Actually, there's two releases, with the very latest just fixing up a woops.
Bloons TD 6 is an absolutely wonderful family-friendly Tower Defense game, and if you don't own it already you can grab it free on Epic Games and it works great on Linux.
More content for your colony? Absolutely. Klei has put out the latest free update for Oxygen Not Included and there's another of their fancy animated shorts.
After being in Early Access since 2019, Neon Noodles - Cyberpunk Kitchen Automation has now fully released and it looks great. I liked it when I tried it out some time ago so it's good to see the developer finish it up.
Two bundles of games? That's right, an easy way for you to fill up that games library because a few more couldn't hurt. Humble Bundle have two new bundles full of games for you.
I wrote about all the porting work done recently for Plasma in yesterday’s Plasma 6 update. That work consumed a lot of time due to a big push to get it all done, so this week there isn’t as much feature work and UI polishing to report. Nevertheless, some good fixes and improvements made it in, especially for KWin and Dolphin!
Copying and pasting files to the desktop that won’t fit there because there’s not enough space now shows a notification explaining the problem (Thenujan Sandramohan, link)
In the Plasma Wayland session, cursors now look better when using fractional scale factors (Vlad Zahorodnii, link)
Since the last update two month ago we added new import options, public transport mode preferences and many more improvements to KDE Itinerary, and it got featured prominently on the awesome new KDE for Travelers page.
The various options to import data into Itinerary have been consolidated behind a single global menu action.
A new way to import online railway tickets has been added as well. Using the booking reference and passenger name or the corresponding app import URLs we can now retrieve the booking details from the operator directly.
This is currently only available for Deutsche Bahn and SNCF. For adding more operators we again rely on your input in identifying the corresponding APIs and URLs of operators offering that feature.
In the old age, developing the desktop was simple™Ã¯Â¸Â. You only had to install a handful of toolchains, development headers, and tools from the distribution packages, run make install, execute say_prayer.sh and if you had not eaten meat on Friday you had a 25% chance for your system to work after a reboot.
Well, if you are an application developer Flatpak makes this very simple. Applications run against a containerized runtimes, with their own userspace. The only thing they need from the host system is a working Desktop Environment, Flatpak, and Portals. Builder and flatpak-builder along with all the integration we built into the Desktop make sure that it will be a breeze.
Even if the version number makes it look like a small point release to last month’s Nitrux 2.9 release, Nitrux 2.9.1 get a major kernel bump from Linux 6.3, which reached end of life on July 11th, 2023, to the latest Linux 6.4 kernel series. Nitrux 2.9.1 comes with a Liquorix-flavored Linux kernel 6.4.8.
On top of that, this release ships with the very latest KDE software, including the KDE Plasma 5.27.7 LTS desktop environment, as well as KDE Frameworks 5.108 and KDE Gear 23.04.3 software suites, all built against the Qt 5.15.5 LTS open-source application framework.
It is time for another release of IPFire: IPFire 2.27 - Core Update 177. A brand-new update which brings enhanced hardening for the IPFire OS on modern processors, a large number of package updates and fixes various security vulnerabilities in the Linux kernel, AMD processors, OpenSSH and more.
Before we start talking about the changes in detail, we would like to ask for your support. We put a lot of effort into building and testing this update and could not do any of this without you. Please, if you can, donate to the project helping us to put more resources to bring you more and better updates. It is very much appreciated by all of us here!
SUSE developer Aleksa Sarai has created Incus, a fork of Canonical's LXD code, with the backing of the now-former lead developer of the container-manager-cum-hypervisor.
A month ago, Canonical announced LXD would not be independent any more, and the Ubuntu maker was withdrawing it from the Linux Containers project and taking development in-house.
Soon afterward at least one potential reason for Canonical's move became public: the former lead engineer of LXD, Stéphane Graber, declared that he had left the Linux distro developer. He stated he planned to continue contributing to the project and will be working under the handle Zabbly...
Orange Pi has just unveiled their latest single-board computer, featuring the high-performing Rockchip RK3566 SoC. This new SBC comes equipped with a wide range of peripherals useful for various embedded applications. Key features include a GbE port, multiple display interfaces, and seamless wireless connectivity.
As previously mentioned, the Orange Pi 3B features the Rockchip RK3566 System-on-Chip with 22nm process similarly as the Boardcon RK3566 seen last month.
In terms of operating system compatibility, the new SBC supports a wide range of options, including Android 11, Ubuntu 22.04, Ubuntu 20.04, Debian 11, Debian 12, OpenHarmony 4.0 Beta1, Orange Pi OS (Arch), Orange Pi OS, etc.
Orange Pi 3B is a new Rockchip RK3566 SBC that’s like a supercharged Raspberry Pi 3B board with the same form factor, but with a faster processor, up to 8GB RAM, and support for multiple storage options with a microSD card slot, an eMMC flash socket, an M.2 Key-M socket for NVMe (PCIe 2.1) or SATA III SSDs, as well as an SPI flash that should enable features like network boot.
The board also features HDMI 2.0 and eDP display intefaces, a Gigabit Ethernet port, a WiFI 5 and Bluetooth 5.0 wireless module, four USB ports, MIPI DSI and CSI connector, and the 40-pin Raspberry Pi GPIO header. It’s powered through a USB-C port taking 5V instead of the micro USB port found in the Raspberry Pi 3B.
A few months ago, Eugene Olsen’s church lost its organist when they moved out of the area, but Eugene noticed that the organ happened to have a MIDI interface. He used a Raspberry Pi 4 and grabbed MIDI files of the hymns, then wrote a custom hymn player in C++.
Racing simulators these days are very good, thanks to incredibly realistic graphics and physics. Developers have recreated the effects of everything from tire composition to asphalt temperature. But a lot of that effort goes to waste when you’re playing with a standard gamepad, because that can’t probably any feedback other than some vibration. To make the most of racing sims, Jason Winfield built a DIY force feedback steering wheel using the motor from an old power drill.
Force feedback steering wheels act as both input devices and output devices. As input devices, they monitor the angle of the wheel to provide a steering value to the game. As output devices, a motor forces the steering wheel to rotate based on what occurs within the simulation. In a hard turn, it might provide resistance. If you spin out of control, the wheel might move around wildly. Because that has to overcome the player’s own grip on the wheel, the force feedback motor needs a lot of torque and that’s why Winfield chose to scavenge the motor from a power drill.
This project visualizes a sinusoidal function on an OLED screen, and a LED can simulate these fluctuations, with a bit of trigonometry. It is easy to understand the code, although the LED may seem to increase and decrease its brightness, in reality, this process is digital and not analog, using a process called PWM.
Last weekend I went to my first vintage computer festival: Vintage Computer Festival Southeast 2023.
There are a number of Vintage Computer Festivals around the US throughout the year. Check out the VCF web site for a list.
Here are some of the highlights of what I saw.
OSI has been celebrating 25 years of Open Source at tech conferences around the world.
Is it “open source”? The question doesn’t really matter. – Matt Asay When we as an industry talk about whether the term open source matters, we need to talk about that question on more than one level. There’s the obvious question of the licensing for a given project.
Matt Asay’s article “The Open Source Licensing War is Over” has been making the rounds this week, as text and subtext. While his position is certainly spicy, I don’t think it’s entirely wrong. “It’s not that open source doesn’t matter, but rather it has never mattered in the way some hoped or believed,” Asay writes. I think that’s true, and it’s our fault.
To the average person, and even to many developers, the freeness or openness of the software doesn’t matter. They want to be able to solve their problem in the easiest (and cheapest) way. Often that’s open source software. Sometimes it isn’t. But they’re not sitting there thinking about the societal impact of their software choices. They’re trying to get a job done.
Here’s our summary of updates, events and activities in the LibreOffice project in the last four weeks – click the links to learn more… We started July by welcoming Michael Weghorn to The Document Foundation, the non-profit behind LibreOffice. Michael is a developer and will initially focus on accessibility improvements.
ZdenÃâºk Crhonek (aka “raal”) from the Czech LibreOffice community writes: The Czech team has finished its translation of the LibreOffice Draw Guide 7.4.
LibreOffice includes a wide range of features, covering most use-cases. But it also supports extensions for more functionality, and our worldwide community has submitted hundreds of great extensions (and templates).
The LibreOffice Documentation Team is proud to release the latest version of the Getting Started Guide updated to the features available in LibreOffice 7.5. This book is for anyone who wants to get up to speed quickly with LibreOffice 7.5.
As global movements, Open Source and Open Science face language-based exclusion as most resources are in English. This affects scientists and research software engineers working in R, particularly those who don’t have English as their first language.
rOpenSci multilingual efforts aim to lower access barriers, democratize quality resources, and increase the possibilities of contributing to open software and science. We successfully piloted our Spanish-language peer review and the localization to Spanish of our comprehensive guide to software development, with Portuguese translation underway.
As Fellowship representative, I had tried to start a discussion about these funds at the 2017 annual meeting. I put forward several motions for discussion. Each motion was submitted as a separate topic for the meeting agenda. Spitefully, the FSFE president, Matthias Kirschner, merged all the motions into a single motion and had the group vote it away.
Yesterday we announced that Codecov is now “Open Source”, and we messed up in two ways:
We wrongly used the term Open Source; while unintentional, we should have known better
We let our emotions get the best of trying to explain our position, rather than stepping back and addressing the problem
I want to talk about both of these, how we made the mistake, why it’s important to us, and what we plan to do about this to improve the conversation in the future.
Sadly, it doesn’t work like that. You cannot solve the problem with the same mentality that created it. Sometimes money is not the solution. Sometimes bringing in new people is not the solution. Sometimes, we have to start from the within and be honest about why one environment stayed at point A while others went to point C.
I implemented the framed closed curves exposed in this blog post, in Julia and R. In fact it is useless with R, because the rgl function cylinder3d is faster and better.
Here is the Julia implementation: [...]
Rust’s use of generics enables developers to write flexible and reusable code. Generics allow functions, structs, and enums to be defined without specifying the type of data they will operate on. This means that a single implementation can work with various types of data, making the code more versatile. Additionally, generics provide better type safety and reduce the likelihood of errors.xs
In startups, focus on what could go right instead of wrong.
Startups are call options in more ways than one. The extreme downside is capped at zero — the startup fails. You’ve lost time and effort, but the company wasn’t worth much (if anything) in the nascent stages. The fewer users you have, the fewer that will remember the product even existed.
But behind the scenes, there’s a lot more going on. I’ll describe some of what happens, and (much much more importantly!) explain some tools you can use to see what’s going on behind the scenes yourself. We’ll use readelf, strace, ldd, debugfs, /proc, ltrace, dd, and stat. I won’t talk about the Python-specific parts at all – just what happens when you run any dynamically linked executable.
I shared this newly published database with the OpenSSF Vulnerability Disclosures WG and received lots of feedback and tips for managing an OSV advisory database. Madison Oliver of GitHub Security gave advice on being a CNA and guidance for hosting first-party and third-party advisories as a CNA. Also received helpful feedback from Oliver Chang and Andrew Pollock. Thanks everyone!
Being a participant in the distributed vulnerability database for OSV requires choosing an ID prefix for advisories. I chose PSF as the prefix and the prefix was accepted into the OSV schema specification. After the prefix was selected I configured automation in the database to automatically assign IDs for the PSF prefix.
