03.07.21

Audiocasts/Shows

• KDE Community Edition PinePhone Unboxing and First Try! – YouTube

  In this video I’m “unboxing” (or, rather, showing the box and its contents) of the pinephone, and trying it for my first time!

• This Week in Linux 141: GRUB 2 Security Flaw, Linux Mint to Force Updates?, Valve’s Steam Link

  On this episode of This Week in Linux, we’re going to try something different with the show. Let me know what you think of the changes. This episode is completely stacked with exciting news, we’ve got a ton of Distro News from Ubuntu, openSUSE, Linux Mint, SystemRescue, IPFire, and even Linux From Scratch. A vulnerability was found in GRUB 2 that lets someone bypass Secure Boot so we’ll talk about that and just how bad is it? The EU announced some great news related to Right to Repair. Valve has announced that Steam Link is now available on Linux and it’s a real game changer. We’ve also got some media production news to check out this week from Blender, Ardour and a new synthesizer called Vital. All that and much more on Your Weekly Source for Linux GNews!

Kernel Space

• Linux 5.11.4 Released With Some Prominent Fixes, Hardware Additions

  While Linux 5.12-rc2 released on Friday due to that prominent corruption bug, there still is some Sunday kernel fun with Greg Kroah-Hartman releasing a slew of stable kernel updates including Linux 5.11.4 and 5.10.21 LTS.

• Btrfs Will Finally “Strongly Discourage” You When Creating RAID5 / RAID6 Arrays

  For a number of years it has been known that the Btrfs RAID5 and RAID6 code is potentially unsafe and not nearly as mature as the native RAID support found in this Linux file-system for other levels. Finally now we are seeing the Btrfs user-space programs warn the user when attempting to create such Btrfs native RAID 5/6 configurations.

  There have been improvements to the Btrfs RAID 5/6 code in recent years but still it’s not nearly as well off as the RAID 0/1/10 support. On the Btrfs Wiki there has been information on the RAID 5/6 status and the implementation’s current shortcomings. But if you don’t read the Wiki or past news articles about the iffy Btrfs RAID 5/6 code, you might not know about it… So finally in 2021, the Btrfs user-space programs are warning the user.

• Graphics Stack

  • Mesa 21.1 Addresses Issue Of Gallium Nine Often Hitting Memory Issues With 32-bit Games – Phoronix

    For those using Gallium3D Nine as a Direct3D 9 state tracker when running Windows games on Linux rather than the likes of DXVK for going through Vulkan, next quarter’s Mesa 21.1 will better handle 32-bit games with the Nine state tracker.

    As written about a few days ago, Gallium Nine has been seeing a fresh round of improvements for this D3D9 state tracker that has long been part of Gallium3D. Gallium Nine is still used particularly by those with older hardware lacking Vulkan support where DXVK is then unsupported. Gallium Nine also generally performs better than using Wine’s Direct3D 9 to OpenGL code path albeit making use of “Nine” requires a patched version of Wine.

Applications

• AviDemux 2.7.8 (64-bit)

  Avidemux is a free video editor designed for simple cutting, filtering and encoding tasks. It supports many file types, including AVI, DVD compatible MPEG files, MP4 and ASF, using a variety of codecs. Tasks can be automated using projects, job queue and powerful scripting capabilities. Avidemux is available for Linux, BSD, Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows under the GNU GPL license.

• Avidemux 2.7.8 Is Released

  The latest version of the Avidemux video editor/converter for Linux, Windows and macOS has tons of new video filters, basic HDR support when working with Matroska and WebM containers, 24-bit uncompressed audio support in several file formats and a lot more.

  [...]

  Avidemux is a simple non-linear video editor most suitable for converting between file formats and quick edits to a single video file. It is not a fully featured video editor like kdenlive and DaVinci Resolve, but it can be used to remove black borders, cut a section out of a longer video file, apply filters and those kinds of things.

• Avidemux 2.7.8 Released! How to Install it in Ubuntu 20.04

  The free open-source Avidemux video editor 2.7.8 was released with many new features. Here’s how to install it in Ubuntu via PPA.

  The new release features many new video filters. A dedicated MOV muxer is available to replace MOV muxing mode within the MP4 muxer; A subset of color info relevant for HDR support is retained in copy mode when both input and output video are stored in Matroska / WebM containers.

  The indexer in the MPEG-TS demuxer now detects resolution changes in MPEG-2 and H.264 streams.

  YUV varieties of the lossless Ut Video codec are supported via bundled FFmpeg library. Multi-threaded video decoding is now available for the bundled FFmpeg.

• Thunar 4.16.4 Is Released

  The latest version of the Thunar file manager for the Xfce desktop environment has six bug-fixes and updated translations for four languages.

• Cross Platform Light & Dark Themes and Icons

  On the most Unices that use X11/Wayland and therefore are capable of running the full Plasma Desktop the state of light & dark themes and the accompanied icon themes is really good for KDE Frameworks based application.

  Just take a look at these two screenshots of a light and dark mode Kate running on GNU Linux/X11 & Plasma Desktop.

• Task-based menus for a file

  Just throwing this out for wider talk perhaps. I have been silently watching a list called xdg@lists.freedesktop.org. Now the list talks about freedesktop standards which basically is trying to have some sort of standards that all desktop environments can follow. One of the discussions on the specific list shared above is and was about ‘New MimeType fields in .desktop’ . It is a fascinating thread with many people giving loads of interesting view points. If you are into desktops even casually, you would enjoy the discussions thoroughly.

  [...]

  There are also lot of banking stuff that we cannot do on free software, especially in India as lot of powerful proprietary interests are there which make sure that no public API’s are available, or even if there is, it would be something half-done or after back and forth, they say, this is just for show, as had shared last year. I would probably add another section later to talk about it. From what little I know, in Europe the law mandates that there are public API’s not only for banking but wherever public money (read taxpayer money) is involved. Again, not all countries, but some more than others. At least, that is what I had seen over the years.

• Small Image Tools that Pack a Real Punch

  The spotlight usually focuses on the heavyweight Linux graphics tools such as GIMP, Shotwell, digiKam, Inkscape, and Krita. However, there are many other open source graphics tools that merit attention.

  Linux offers a vast collection of open source small utilities that perform functions ranging from the obvious to the bizarre. It is the quality and selection of these tools that help Linux stand out as a productive environment. A good utility cooperates with other applications, integrating seamlessly.

  Although command-line tools are very useful for updating, configuring, and repairing a system, their benefits are not only confined to system administration. The majority of the applications featured in this article are command-line tools. They are very light on system resources, fast and efficient, don’t rely on a windowing system, and are great for integrating with other applications and scripting.

  The term lightweight is a label attached to computer software which is relatively simpler or faster than its counterparts. Feature bloat is endemic in software especially commercial software. Often, the easiest way to persuade users to upgrade to the latest version is to add new spangly features. This happens with open source software (to a lesser degree), and open source graphics software is not immune to feature bloat. Well, there is no feature bloat here!

  To provide an insight into the quality of software that is available, we have compiled a list of small image tools that are incredibly useful.

Instructionals/Technical

• How to visualize complex data on Linux

  You’ve probably heard of Elasticsearch – the search engine that enables you to index and then quickly search through your data. You may have created a few visualizations in Kibana, the GUI for Elasticsearch, pointing and clicking your way through the sleek interface.

  What you may not have used is a lesser-known visualization plugin called Timelion.

  Timelion is a fantastic visualization creation tool that makes it possible to write out your queries in its simple and powerful expression language to display graphs. It’s used for displaying time-series data such as population growth or hits to your website.

• How to configure Static Local IP Address in Ubuntu

  In Linux, if you were working on networking, you may be came to a point when you need to assign static IP to your system over the local network.

  There may be any reason. If you want to communicate with a PC on the network, then whenever your system restarts, local IP changes based on the subnet mask. To avoid this, you need to fix your preferred local IP in the network configuration.

Games

• Rocket League Still Thriving on Steam While Delisted

  As you can see from the above chart, the Rocket League community on Steam has never been as active as now, even though the game is officially delisted. The game is alive and well and continues to be receive frequent updates on Steam – and the increase of the player base through EGS has potentially made the game more enticing than ever to play online, regardless of the platform.

  Wile you cannot purchase Rocket League directly on Steam anymore, it can still be obtained through third party resellers. Such third party key are selling at crazy prices, sometimes above 100 USD.

  [...]

  Also, this is a reminder that Rocket League still works fine on Linux even after the termination of the native port and the big Epic client update in September 2020…

Desktop Environments/WMs

• Xfdashboard 0.9.0 Is Released

  Xfdashboard is a little-known gem that provides a application management interface that is somewhat similar to the GNOME shell dashboard and the macOS Mission Control interface. It presents an overview of all the windows on a given virtual desktop with a separate xfdashboard instance on each screen on multi-monitor setups. GNU/Linux distributions do not tend to integrate Xfdashboard with the Xfce desktop environment they ship on their Xfce spins so most Xfce users are blissfully unaware of its existence.

  Xfdashboard can easily be “integrated” with Xfce, and other desktop environments and window-managers, by adding a panel shortcut and/or a keyboard shortcut that starts xfdashboard. It works fine with window-managers like Fluxbox and Openbox and desktop environments like LXQt and, obviously, Xfce.

  There are some minor issues with xfdashboard that are somewhat annoying when it is compared to a similar solution on a proprietary operating system made by an American fruit company. For example, the type-to-search function is case-sensitive. Typing g will not show the GNU Image Manipulation Program because that programs name starts with GNU in capital letters, you have to type G to find it. There is also an issue with minimized windows, their content is not shown. There is a “workaround” available in xfdashboard-settings, it can be configured to restore and re-minimize minimized windows to grab their content. This is kind of slow if you have lots of windows open.

Distributions

• Hands-On with Raspup on Raspberry Pi 4: Puppy Linux for Tinkerers

  If you never heard of Raspup before, let me tell you that it’s a Debian-based GNU/Linux distribution built from the Woof-CE build system that was originally developed by Barry Kauler, the creator of Puppy Linux, and binary compatible with Raspbian (the official Raspberry Pi OS).

  As such, Raspup is a Puppy Linux port for Raspberry Pi. Raspup was created by Michael Amadio and it’s designed to run on ARMv7l hardware, specifically on the Raspberry Pi Zero, Raspberry Pi 1, Raspberry Pi 2, Raspberry Pi 3, Raspberry Pi 3+, and Raspberry Pi 4 single-board computers (SBCs).

• Debian Family

  • Thorsten Alteholz: My Debian Activities in February 2021

    FTP master

    This month I accepted 162 and rejected 28 packages, which is again a small increase compared to last month. The overall number of packages that got accepted was 291.

    Debian LTS

    This was my eightieth month that I did some work for the Debian LTS initiative, started by Raphael Hertzog at Freexian.

  • RCBW 21.9 – jwiltshire.org.uk

    A recent upload of electrum suffers from the serious bug #981374. On the face of it this is just a missing package dependency: can you help with testing and preparing an updated package to fix this? You don’t need to be a Debian Developer to get stuck into this one!

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• FSF

  • GNU Projects

    • Glibc 2.34 Will Provide More Helpful Linker Diagnostics – Phoronix

      With the exciting “HWCAPS” feature of Glibc 2.33+ allowing for optimized versions of libraries to be more easily deployed on Linux systems, diagnosing issues around it can be a bit more complicated but on the way for Glibc 2.34 is a welcome improvement to help in such issues.

      Merging this week for the dynamic link (ld.so) in Glibc 2.34 is a –list-diagnostics option. This new option will provide a system dump of information around the glibc-hwcaps sub-directory selection as well as IFUNC resolver operation and other CPU/system details. This can be useful for ensuring the desired HWCAPS path is actually being used on a given system and other information for diagnosing bugs or other problems with this more complicated handling but performance beneficial HWCAPS feature. The IFUNC “indirect function” resolver behavior is similarly important at run-time.

    • Moreutils – An Extension of GNU Core Utilities

      As you may know, I am a huge proponent of the GNU Core Utilities. I believe the tools included are required learning for any new Linux admin. Although it offers important everyday commands such as touch, head, basename, tail and many more, it cannot provide a tool for everything. This is where moreutils comes in. It provides some additional utilities that every Linux Admin or DevOps Engineer could use. In this article we will show you how to install the moreutils package and give a brief description of it’s packages.

      [...]

      Below is a list of utilities included in the moreutils package. Some Linux distributions do not include all the utilities in their package. So you may or may not have all of the commands listed below.

Google’s new idea is a self-checkout store

A flock is a “group of animals (such as birds or sheep) assembled or herded together”. A FLoC, as its spelling hints, is a vaguely similar concept, just applied to people. FLoC is the acronym of “Federated Learning of Cohorts”, that is Google’s recent proposal to get rid of browser cookies, that is one of the most important tools for whoever wants to spy everything people do on the Web.

A cookie is just a small text file with a unique identifier inside. When you first visit most websites (not this!) they give your browser one of these cookies. When you return to those websites, or visit any other website that’s associated with them, they ask you to show any cookie they had given before, so they can recognize you. Sometimes this happens just to spare you from typing passwords at every visit. But eventually, by giving and sharing cookies websites create, and exploit, complete profiles of every individual web user. Political polarization, invisible discrimination and uninterrupted surveillance are just the main categories of abuses created by this way to do behavioral, completely personalized advertising.

[...]

Initially those stores, by dumping prices and a myriad other factors, were just the one place in the neighborhood where you can buy affordable food, but most that food was junk. Initially, the cashiers in those stores bagged the groceries for you. Now, you must go there to buy the same food as before, no competition, but the cashiers were fired

You can still shop at the same monopolistic

FLOC looks like Google saying hey, we want to track you just like before, but please do it some of the analysis and data storage yourself

Finance

• Silicon Valley ran on Saudi

  In September 2019, several famous high-tech companies like Uber, WeWork, Slack, MapBox DoorDash… all were – or had been at one point all backed by Vision Fund, an enormous venture capital fund whose size is _“almost double the investments made by U.S. venture firms last year.”

  What was little known (again: in 2019) is that a key contributing partner to the Vision Fund, that is managed by a Japanese holding company called SoftBank, was the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. So… what does it mean for members of the Saudi Public Wealth Fund to be on the boards of high-tech stars of the Silicon Valley?

Monopolies

• Copyrights

  • More copyright nonsense. From COPS, this time

    One month ago, a Los Angeles activist entered the Beverly Hills police department, to request body camera footage from an incident in which he received a ticket he felt was unfair. He streamed the whole visit, as he usually does on his Instagram channel whenever he interacts with police officials.

    Everything went smoothly, until the police sergeant realizes that the activist was “live-streaming the interaction, including showing work contact information for another officer”.

  • Copyright Idiocy is strong with these ones

    Lego and Twitch, the Dark Lords of the Mad Copyright Siths. Always Two There Are.
    In the last ten years, I have sadly reported many stories about the embarrassing madness of modern copyright, here and here. Follow those links, and you will find true horror stories that literally go from the Moon to comics stories, luxury chairs, Tolkien, Poirot and much more. This year, there already are (at least) two more horror stories to add to that sad list.

    [...]

    I just read on an italian newspaper that Thomas Panke is the owner of a toy shop in Frankfurt. On his popular Youtube channel, called “Held der Steine” (“Hero of the bricks”), he reviews everything you throw at him, as long as it’s built with those little plastic bricks that billions of people have been calling “lego” for decades now, whoever had made them.