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Links 11/11/2021: Homage to Ken Starks, New Sparky Linux, Go Turns 12



  • GNU/Linux

    • Desktop/Laptop

      • Ken Starks Hangs Up His Spurs at Reglue

        In 2005, I placed my first Linux-powered refurbished computer with a young middle school student. She was the daughter of a single mother with four children who could barely pay the rent. A computer for her gifted child was out of the question. The young student was Haley Ann Peters and she is now a geologist.

        With that, I began a 20 year journey; placing computers into the homes of kids who couldn’t afford to purchase them. In the beginning it was The HeliOS Project, and just getting donations of equipment was a challenge to say the least. But by 2012 we had morphed into our own nonprofit with our own facility, and a pool of over 100 volunteers who made Reglue.org the success it became. Since then, Reglue.org has placed 2,237 computers into financially-disadvantaged homes of students, ranging from middle school kids to graduate students.

        I don’t want to rehash our history. Searching my name and Reglue or Helios Project will give you a full night’s reading if you wish to do so.

        I’ve been blessed to do the work I do. I’ve given two keynote addresses for LinuxFest, created a number of community computer facilities, and held classes to assist senior citizens on the finer points of using a computer. That’s not to mention personally supplying support for all the computers we’ve placed. But if I had to name one accomplishment that gave me the most satisfaction, it would be creating the Bruno Knaapen Technology Learning Center. Bruno Knaapen was an open source and Linux advocate who worked tirelessly to help people understand computer technology, and he did so free of charge. We lost Bruno to brain cancer in 2009.

    • Audiocasts/Shows

    • Kernel Space

      • Celebrating 30 years of Linux - is 2021 finally the year of the Linux desktop? [Ed: We're not sure why some people write about it now (3 months late)]

        These two cause the most visible differences, but they are just the tip of the iceberg. Just think about Linux distributions. What are distributions: a Linux kernel and some applications integrated around it. Often even the same window manager looks different and behaves in a different way on another distribution. What is more: there can be major changes when you upgrade to the next version of the same distribution.

        Most of the Linux distributions have a one year life span and then the users are advised to upgrade. If they keep using it, they are left without security updates and bug fixes. There are distributions with longer life times, but then comes another problem: they might be difficult or impossible to install on a new computer. I had to switch from openSUSE to Fedora temporarily for a few months when I got my last two laptops. These large changes on the desktop can be avoided when someone uses a rolling distribution. They are constantly updated, which means that there are no jumps, but there are small changes all the time.

        Comparing it to Windows: you can have the same look and feel for a decade. And except for Windows 8, the main concept of the Windows desktop is the same from Windows 95 until today.

        Most users do not like choices, and changes even less. With Linux distributions and various window managers they receive an endless amount of choices and changes. I love it from day one, just as many developers. But do we wonder that Linux is running only about two percent of desktops?

      • Extent-tree-v2: Global Roots and Block Group Root

        I’m working on a large set of on-disk format changes to address some of the more painful parts of Btrfs’s design. There’s a lot of discrete changes here, but they’ll all go under the single umbrella of “extent-tree-v2.” We’ve spent a few months going back and forth on different approaches, and have finally settled on a final set of changes. The global roots and block group root patches have been completed and submitted, but there’s a lot more change coming.

      • On-Disk Format Changes Ahead To Improve "Painful" Parts Of Btrfs Design - Phoronix

        Prominent Btrfs file-system developer Josef Bacik is working through a big set of patches that will result in on-disk format changes to Btrfs but address some of "the more painful parts" to the file-system's design.

        Over the next year Josef is looking to land these changes to address locking contention on global roots and the issue of block group items being spread throughout the extent tree.

        He is developing this work under the "extent-tree-v2" label and to date is around 80 patches but is just getting started. He's hoping in the next 6~12 months it will be something users can start migrating to in order to take advantage of these Btrfs design improvements.

      • F2FS With Linux 5.16 Will Let You Intentionally Fragment The Disk - Phoronix

        Jaegeuk Kim submitted the Flash-Friendly File-System (F2FS) updates on Wednesday for the nearly over Linux 5.16 merge window.

        The F2FS changes this cycle aren't particularly large but include a few enhancements and a number of bug fixes along with some code cleaning. One interesting new addition is adding a mount option to intentionally fragment the on-disk layout of F2FS file-systems.

        F2FS' "mode=" mount option has added new options to simulate file-system fragmentation after garbage collection. The "fragment:segment" option will create a new segment in a random position while "fragment:block" will scatter block allocation. New sysfs nodes are added for further tuning the behavior of the "mode=fragment:block" option. Details in this commit.

    • Applications

      • 26 Best Free Open-source Calendar Apps for Windows, Linux, and macOS

        Calendar is an app that is used on daily basis, it is a significant tool for organization, planning, daily routine tasks, appointments management, and personal improvements.

        As an example, Google Calendar is a scheduling calendar service by Google. It aids users in creating events, tasks, schedule and managing appointments, and keeping everything in sync and stored on the cloud. It also allows users to share events, attach locations, and more.

        The primary problem is: it requires an internet connection.

        In this article, we provide you with a collection of desktop calendar apps, that will help you to organize your events, deal with calendar files and keep track of your tasks and daily routines.

      • gmipay v1.2 released, with subscription support

        Good time of day, fellow spacemen.

        Version 1.2 of gmipay has been released.

        gmipay is a Gemini payment processing proxy CGI script. It allows you to sell your content (or buy others') and have it served transparently and with no friction.

    • Instructionals/Technical

      • How to run different PHP versions on the same server - Unixcop the Unix / Linux the admins deams

        Sometimes a SysAdmin receives strange requests. For example: a couple of days ago my client need to upload a new site, this new site needs PHP7.4 while their server run with PHP7.2. I’ve installed then 7.4 but all the other VirtualHosts (at least the important ones) broke under php7.4. Initially I was thinking on some kind of containers but I’ve found something simpler. This is how to run different PHP versions on the same server.

      • How to easily transfer files between computers with croc - TechRepublic

        Usually, when I want to transfer files between computers on the same network, I'll use the scp command. But sometimes I want something a bit simpler to use. When those instances arise, I turn to a very handy command-line tool called croc. With this easy-to-use tool, you can transfer files and folders from one system to another, without having to remember much in the way of commands.

      • How to install Rabbitmq in Rocky Linux/Centos 8

        In this guide we will explore how to install the latest release of RabbitMQ in Rocky Linux 8 server or Workstation. This will also work for RHEL 8 derivatives like Oracle linux, Alma linux and Centos 8.

        RabbitMQ is an open source message broker software that implements the Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP). RabbitMQ works by receiving messages from publishers (applications that publish them) and routes them to consumers (applications that process them).

      • How to install and Use Lynis on Fedora 35 – NextGenTips

        In this guide we are going to learn how to install and use Lynis on Fedora 35.

        Lynis is an open-source, battle-tested security tool for systems running Linux, MacOS and Unix-based operating system. It performs an extensive health scan of your system in order to support hardening and compliance testing.

        Lynis gives complete information about the current operating system, current operating system version, hardware running on the Linux machine, firmware information etc.

      • How to install Podman on Rocky Linux 8 / AlmaLinux to run Containers

        Podman is promoted as an alternative to Docker that advertises as a tool compatible with Docker Images. Also, it offers a command line that is identical to Docker and is intended to simplify the migration from Docker to Podman for both users and programs. Under the hood, however, the two container tools are very different. Podman is a daemon-less tool instead its uses runC container runtime process where Docker uses a daemon to manage all resources.

        Developed by Redhat this container tool was originally planned as a debugging tool for the CRI-O container engine, which is specialized in Kubernetes, in order to simplify certain tasks for application developers and administrators of Kubernetes clusters. Since then, however, Podman has grown into a comprehensive tool for container management. Developers can easily install it from major software sources in Linux distributions such as Fedora, Arch Linux, and openSUSE Tumbleweed.

      • How to Install and Set Up Telegram on Linux

        Telegram is a popular instant messaging platform that lets you send messages, make VoIP calls, and share files, both on mobile devices and on your desktop.

        If you frequently use Telegram for all of your communications—and only have it on your phone—you might want to install it on your desktop, too, to respond to calls and messages while you're at your desk.

        In case you're running Linux, though, installing Telegram can be a little complicated—just like installing other software. So to simplify things, here's a guide to help you install Telegram on your Linux machine.

      • How to Install HAProxy on Debian 11

        HAProxy is a free, open-source, and reliable solution for high availability and load balancing. It distributes the load across the multiple application servers and to simplify the request processing tasks. It can be installed on all major Linux operating systems. It is popular due to its efficiency, reliability, and low memory and CPU footprint.

        In this post, we will explain how to install HAProxy on a Debian 11 system.

      • How to Create a Self-Signed Certificate in Linux

        Creating a self-signed SSL certificate in Linux is quite easy and can be done in just a few clicks. You can use a self-signed certificate to secure the connection between your web server and a visitor's browser. Linux makes it really easy for you to generate a certificate and sign it using a private key.

        Here's how you can create your own SSL certificates right from your Linux terminal.

      • How To Install and Enable EPEL Repository on Rocky Linux/Centos 8

        In this guide, we will learn how to install and enable EPEL repository on Rocky Linux/Centos 8. This guide will also work for RHEL 8 and its derivatives like Alma Linux, Oracle Linux, Scientific Linux, etc.

        EPEL is a repository that provides extra packages for Enterprise Linux. The EPEL repository is an additional package repository that provides easy access to install packages for commonly used software. This repo was created because Fedora contributors wanted to use Fedora packages they maintain on RHEL and other compatible distributions. The EPEL group creates, maintains and manages a high-quality set of additional packages. These packages may be software not included in the core repository, or sometimes updates which haven’t been provided yet.

      • How To Install Blender on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS - idroot

        In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Blender on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Blender 3D is a professional open-source 3D graphics and animation software. It has a rich feature set like animations, visual effects, 3D modeling, and motion graphics. This provides outstanding outcomes and is used in professional filmmaking.

        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 Blender 3D Creation Software on Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal Fossa). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 18.04, 16.04, and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint.

      • Convert PNG Images to WebP on Linux (With Commands) - Linux Nightly

        The WebP image format is great at compressing photos to incredibly small file sizes. This makes it an ideal format for images on websites, just as its name would imply. Outside of web hosting, the PNG image format is much more popular and better suited to archiving.

        In this tutorial, you’ll see how to convert WebP images to PNG with Linux commands. You’ll also see how to convert images into WebP, in case you plan to upload photos somewhere and want the smaller file size for your web visitors.

      • Install Security Patches or Updates Automatically on Rocky or AlmaLinux 8

        Keeping your operating systems up to date with the latest software and security patches is one of the easiest methods to improve security. As a result, deploying updates regularly is a vital aspect of keeping systems secure. However, many users don’t know about the updates, and their system gets old as compared to the latest security patches. So in this blog, we will explain the method to install security patches or updates automatically on Rocky or AlmaLinux.

      • How to install and use Podman in Rocky Linux/Centos 8 – Citizix

        Podman is a container engine that’s compatible with the OCI Containers specification. It is part of RedHat Linux, but can also be installed on other distributions. As it’s OCI-compliant, Podman can be used as a drop-in replacement for the better-known Docker runtime. Most Docker commands can be directly translated to Podman commands. Podman implements almost all the Docker CLI commands (apart from the ones related to Docker Swarm).

        Podman complements Buildah and Skopeo by offering an experience similar to the Docker command line: allowing users to run standalone (non-orchestrated) containers. And Podman doesn’t require a daemon to run containers and pods, so we can easily say goodbye to big fat daemons. There are no daemons in the background doing stuff, and this means that Podman can be integrated into system services through systemd.

      • How to package open source applications as RPMs | Enable Sysadmin

        Recently, I wrote about packaging your own software with Red Hat Package Manager (RPM). Another common scenario is that you find a piece of software you want to use, but there is no RPM for it. This article shows you how to create RPMs for third-party applications.

      • Installing openSUSE Tumbleweed on the Enclustra Mars MA3 - KaratekHD Blog

        As part of my school internship at TEM Messtechnik I got the oppertunity to work on the Enclustra Mars MA3, a FPGA SoC with two ARMv7 cores. This post describes the process of getting Linux (more precisely, openSUSE Tumbleweed) to work on this SoC.

      • The Perfect Server – CentOS 8 with Apache, Postfix, Dovecot, Pure-FTPD, BIND and ISPConfig 3.2

        This tutorial shows the installation of ISPConfig 3.2 on a CentOS 8 (64Bit) server. ISPConfig is a web hosting control panel that allows you to configure the following services through a web browser: Apache web server, PHP, Postfix mail server, MySQL, BIND nameserver, PureFTPd, SpamAssassin, ClamAV, Mailman, and many more.

      • How To Install Debian 11 Bullseye - OSTechNix

        Debian 11, codenamed bullseye, is the latest long-term support release (LTS) that is released after a development period of over two years. Debian 11 comes with the kernel version 5.10 LTS. Over 70% of the packages in Debian repositories are updated to newer versions compared to its previous version buster. To know more about the Debian 11 features you can take a look at the release notes. This step by step guide walks you through the steps to download the latest Debian edition, and create Debian 11 bootable medium and finally how to install Debian 11 bullseye with screenshots.

      • Three different ways to duplicate installed packages in multiple machines in Linux - blackMORE Ops

        So you’ve installed your Linux server and installed all packages you need. Now you’re about to setup another server with similar packages. One thing you can do is to save the install commands from the first one and the run it on the second machine. How about when you’ve done it over few weeks time and forgot some details but need to have another server up and running quickly.

    • Games

      • Godot Engine - Godot Engine receives $100,000 donation from OP Games

        We are happy to announce that the gaming platform OP Games is donating USD 100,000 to the Godot project. These funds will be used to further the general development of the engine.

        As mentioned in their announcement, OP Games is also similarly supporting the open source game development tools Blender and Phaser, and the source available Defold engine. OP Games is also actively looking for game developers interested in their platform, see this contact form for details.

      • OPGames donates $300k to open source including Godot Engine and Blender | GamingOnLinux

        OPGames, a company that (as they describe) helps "turn games into investable assets through NFTs" has donated a bunch of monies to a few great open source projects.

        In their announcement they mentioned $300k has gone to Phaser, Defold, Godot, and Blender. In the announcement OPGames CTO and co-founder Paul Gadi said "We are truly honored to be able to support open-source with the funds raised by our Arcadians community! Open-source game engines are the perfect example of a public good: they are free for anyone to use and safeguards developers from platform lock-in. We hope that this donation will inspire others to support more open-source projects, as they will be foundational in how we break free from the attention economy".

      • The Game Of Life Moves Pretty Fast, If You Don’t Use Stop Motion You Might Miss It | Hackaday

        Munged Ferris Bueller quotes aside, Conway’s Game of Life is the classic cellular automata that we all reach for. The usual approach is to just iterate over every cell in the grid, computing the next state into a new grid buffer. [K155LA3] set out to turn that on its head by implementing Game Of Life in the hardware of an FPGA.

        [K155LA3]’s version uses Chisel, a new HDL from the Berkley and RISCV communities. Under the hood, Chisel is Scala with some custom libraries that know how to map Scala concepts onto hardware. In broad strokes, Verilog and VHDL are focused on expressing hardware and then added abstraction on top of that over the year. Chisel and other newer HDL languages focus on expressing high-level general-purpose elements that get mapped onto hardware. FPGAs already map complex circuits and hardware onto LUTs and other slices, so what’s another layer of abstraction?

      • The Raw Data of the Q2 2021 Linux Gamers Survey - Boiling Steam

        While there are still a few articles coming up, today we are releasing the raw data for everyone to explore and use. Note that this is not the full dataset, but this represents most of it. 94% of respondents actually agreed to have their data shared.

      • Total War: WARHAMMER III gets more new footage | GamingOnLinux

        Now that we know when Total War: WARHAMMER III will release, Creative Assembly has been putting out some more info about it and there's some fresh gameplay videos too. It's still a little while away for release on February 17, with Linux as close as possible to that from Feral Interactibe.

      • Escape Simulator sees over 600 rooms made by players | GamingOnLinux

        Pine Studio has seen quite a success with player interaction with their new game Escape Simulator, with 500 player created rooms in just over two weeks after release and right now it has well over 600.

        The game's team lead, Tomislav Podhraški said: "We couldn't believe what the community was creating with our game. Discovering ingenious ways to outsmart the system and break game physics, simulating iconic pop-culture scenes, and inventing tonnes of narrative surprises. We were completely blown away."

      • Europa Universalis IV: Origins is out along with a big free update | GamingOnLinux

        Europa Universalis IV: Origins is a new "Immersion Pack" available now as a paid DLC for Paradox's popular historical strategy game and the 1.32 Songhai free update is also live.

        From the trading ports on the eastern coast to the gold mines of Mali, early modern Africa was a continent of rich kingdoms and cultural variety. Now, Europa Universalis IV: Origins brings this history to vivid life with new missions, events and regional flavour.

      • The Khronos Group officially announces the Dynamic Rendering extension for Vulkan

        Recently with the Vulkan 1.2.197 specification update, a new extension popped up that has plenty of developers happy with Dynamic Rendering and now The Khronos Group has formally announced it with a more detailed explanation. This is of course aimed at developers, not most of us normal consumers but we still thought it interesting to highlight to bring more attention to it.

        The Vulkan API is vitally important for Linux gaming, since it can provide much greater performance than OpenGL. It's used in the DXVK and VKD3D-Proton projects, which translate Direct 3D to Vulkan for use with Steam Play Proton, and it's the reason we see the performance level with it that we do when running Windows games.

      • Epic Chef: A Cooking Quest of Epic Proportions - Boiling Steam

        Do you enjoy cooking? It’s practically in my family blood. In Epic Chef — developed by Infinigon Games and published by Team17 — you’re playing a game and basically doing the same thing, except it’s a lot less realistic.

        The game starts with Zest, the main protagonist of the game and the character that you use, who gets thrown overboard from a ship and into the land of Concordia. Apparently Zest was trying to do the pirates of the ship a favor, but they seemed to take it the wrong way and forcefully eject him out of their ship.

        Zest has no money, but after talking to some of the people in the town and getting the necessary documents, he is eventually given some land, and a haunted house (the Villa grounds). Well, semi-haunted anyway. That’s why the mortgage is free. The people of Concordia, particularly Private Speck, the guardkeeper of the house, try to convice Zest not to reside there, but Zest has no other options.

    • Distributions

      • Top 5 Best Linux Distros for Beginners That Make You Love Linux

        Linux has always been helpful and dedicated to maintaining servers, systems, local machines, and old systems. If you’re a newbie to Linux, there is a chance that you might get confused about which distribution, which desktop environment you should choose for your system. Well, you can always try out distributions and choose the right one for you. But that process would be a bit time-consuming and tough to find the best Linux distro for beginners.

        Finding the best Linux distro for beginners would really help and save time for getting started with Linux. There were times when only people with programming and system admins used to use Linux, but now it has changed. Linux welcomes all types of users, from students to developers and professionals to beginners.

      • 10 Best Linux Distros for Privacy and Security for 2022

        It is always a concern of users to surf the internet in privacy. However, surfing on the usual operating systems can’t provide the security you want. There’s no need to worry, Linux is among the most private operating systems available. So in this blog, we will list the best Linux Distros for Privacy.

        The below list is completely based on the user reviews, features, security, privacy, and accessibility of these Linux distros.

      • SUSE/OpenSUSE

        • KDE Gear, GNOME Update in Tumbleweed

          Tumbleweed pulled back from the frequency of snapshots released last week, but still had a good amount of releases this week.

          After continuous daily releases from Oct. 27 to Nov. 2, openSUSE Tumbleweed put together another three consecutive snapshots.

          Just four packages arrived in snapshot 20211105 snapshot. The first of the 41.1 GNOME packages arrived in the snapshot. gnome-chess and gnome-remote-desktop. The latter had some adjustments for frame PipeWire data. There was some clean up with the network configuration package wicked in the 0.6.67 version along with changes in the dbus configuration. The aws-cli 1.21.6 package had multiple API changes and relaxed a version dependency for python-docutils.

      • IBM/Red Hat/Fedora

        • Best practices for building images that pass Red Hat Container Certification

          Building unique images for various container orchestrators can be a maintenance and testing headache. A better idea is to build a single image that takes full advantage of the vendor support and security built into Red Hat OpenShift, and that also runs well in Kubernetes.

          A universal application image (UAI) is an image that uses Red Hat Universal Base Image (UBI) from Red Hat Enterprise Linux as its foundation. The UAI also includes the application being deployed, adds extra elements that make it more secure and scalable in Kubernetes and OpenShift, and can pass Red Hat Container Certification.

          This article introduces you to nine best practices you should incorporate into your Dockerfile when building a UAI. Each section in this article explains a practice, shows you how to implement the practice, and includes Red Hat certification requirements related to the topic.

        • What is AI/ML and why does it matter to your business?

          AI/ML—short for artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML)—represents an important evolution in computer science and data processing that is quickly transforming a vast array of industries.

          As businesses and other organizations undergo digital transformation, they’re faced with a growing tsunami of data that is at once incredibly valuable and increasingly burdensome to collect, process and analyze. New tools and methodologies are needed to manage the vast quantity of data being collected, to mine it for insights and to act on those insights when they’re discovered.

        • High performance computing 101

          The data is in—massive amounts of it, and high computing power can help enterprises make some sense out of it. For a technology that has gone through ebbs and flows in popularity, high performance computing (HPC) may be expanding to use cases beyond those found in scientific research as more industries can tap into valuable insights gained from artificial intelligence, machine learning, and other emerging technologies.

          So, what does this mean to your organization? If you’re increasingly facing the need to translate large amounts of consumer data to track trends or calculate thousands of financial transactions a day to support business growth, is HPC something you should be considering?

        • Top 5 resources to learn about the IBM and Cloudera partnership

          Six months, four blogs, three videos, two conference presentations, and one amazing partnership — that is how I would describe the IBM and Cloudera partnership so far. This blog post highlights some of the best developer-focused resources to help you leverage your data to build AI-enabled applications.

          Earlier this year, IBM and Cloudera announced that they would partner together to create a new joint offering: Cloudera Data Platform for IBM Cloud Pak for Data, bringing together two leading data platforms. The benefits of using boths platforms are outlined in the various product pages and focused on security, scalability, and, of course, combining the best technologies for data and AI.

          Soon after, a few of us on the IBM Developer and Hybrid Cloud Build Team were tasked with testing the products, building PoCs for customers, and creating assets to be consumed by external audiences.

          Below are our top five resources for learning about the IBM and Cloudera partnership. Before we get into it, I would like to give a shout-out to the folks that made it possible: Tim Robinson, Brett Coffmann, Dave Fowler, Marc Chisinevski, and Erik Beebe. Let’s get started!

        • CentOS project moves to development using GitLab

          The CentOS Project announced the launch of a collaborative development service based on the GitLab platform. The decision to use GitLab as the primary hosting platform for CentOS and Fedora projects was made last year. It is noteworthy that the infrastructure was raised not on its own servers, but on the basis of the gitlab.com service, in which the gitlab.com/CentOS section is provided for projects related to CentOS.

          At the moment, work is underway to integrate the section with the user base of the CentOS project, which will allow developers to connect to the Gitlab service using existing accounts. Separately, it is noted that git.centos.org based on the Pagure platform will continue to be considered as a place to host the source code of packages ported from RHEL, as well as as the basis for the formation of the CentOS Stream 8 branch. But the CentOS Stream 9 branch is already developing on the basis of a new repository in GitLab and is distinguished by the ability to connect to the development of contributors from the community. Other projects hosted on git.centos.org remain in place for now and are not forced to migrate.

        • Simplify Kafka authentication with Node.js

          Apache Kafka is a publish-subscribe messaging system that is commonly used to build loosely coupled applications. These types of applications are often referred to as reactive applications.

          Our team maintains a reactive example that shows the use of Kafka in a simple application. If you've looked at these types of applications, you know that although the components are decoupled, they need access to a shared Kafka instance. Access to this shared instance must be protected. This means that each component needs a set of security credentials that it can use to connect to the Kafka instance.

          As a Node.js developer, how can you safely share and use those credentials without a lot of work? Read on to find out.

          Note: You can learn more about using Node.js in reactive applications in the article Building reactive systems with Node.js.

        • Contribute at the Fedora Linux 36 Test Week for Kernel 5.15

          The kernel team is working on final integration for kernel 5.15. This version was just recently released, and will arrive soon in Fedora. As a result, the Fedora kernel and QA teams have organized a test week from Sunday, November 14, 2021 through Sunday, November 21, 2021. Refer to the wiki page for links to the test images you’ll need to participate. Read below for details.

        • Fedora Silverlight: not only for your grandma

          I have migrated my grandparents to Fedora Silverlight, previously they used CentOS. I was impressed how everything worked well and I like where Fedora is going overall. Less pre-installed software, I am hoping for more packages to be dropped - Evolution backend, on-line accounts, Maps and others. Overall, it works great.

      • Debian Family

        • Sparky 6.1

          There is a next point release of Sparky 6 – 6.1 “Po Tolo” of the stable line ready to go. Sparky 6 is based on and fully compatible with Debian 11 “Bullseye”.

          Changes: – system upgraded from Debian & Sparky stable repos as of November 9, 2021 – Linux kernel 5.10.70 (PC) – Linux kernel 5.10.63-v7+ (ARMHF) – Firefox 78.14.0esr – Thunderbird 78.14.0 – VLC 3.0.16 – LibreOffice 7.0.4 – LXQt 0.16.0 – Xfce 4.16 – Openbox 3.6.1-9 – KDE Plasma 5.20.5 – small improvements

        • SparkyLinux 6.1 Released with Updated Packages and Improvements

          The SparkyLinux team has announced the release of SparkyLinux 6.1, latest stable update in project’s 6.x series.

          SparkyLinux is a desktop-oriented Linux distro created on the top of the Debian operating system. It is lightweight, fast, and simple Linux distro, suitable to run on old computers without any problems. It’s aims to be easy on system resources and can breathe new life into aging computers.

          SparkyLinux includes a full-fledged operating system with LXQt, Xfce, and KDE desktop environments and minimal images for MinimalGUI and MinimalCLI which enables to install the system with a minimal set of applications, and then choose your own applications via Sparky Advanced Installer. Today the SparkyLinux development team announced the release of SparkyLinux 6.1 rolling operating system. So let’s see what’s new.

      • Canonical/Ubuntu Family

    • Devices/Embedded

    • Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

      • Google removes restrictions on students only from Summer of Code

        Google has announced the annual Google Summer of Code 2022 (GSoC) event aimed at encouraging newbies to work on open source projects. The event is being held for the seventeenth time, but it differs from previous programs in the removal of restrictions on the participation of only undergraduate and graduate students. From now on, any adult who has turned 18 years old can become a GSoC participant, but with the condition that he has not previously made a significant contribution to the development of projects outside the GSoC event and has not participated in the GSoC more than two times. It is understood that the event will now be able to help beginners who want to change their field of activity or are engaged in self-education.

      • Family Management does it need an app? If yes, Try Mea-Familia

        The software package is released under an unusual license: EUPL-1.2 or European Union Public License version 1.2.

      • Events

        • The Linux Foundation Announces Keynote Speakers for Open Source Summit Japan + Automotive Linux Summit 2021 [Ed: Linux Foundation has given Microsoft (Audrey Lee) a greenwashing keynote in an event about "Linux"; they keep doing it... Zemlin et al are monetising the devaluation by misuse of the valuable Linux brand -- a brand that some companies would pay a lot of money to hijack and destroy]

          The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, today announced the keynote speakers for Open Source Summit Japan + Automotive Linux Summit 2021, taking place virtually December 14-15. One registration pass includes access to both events. The keynote speakers can be viewed here and the full schedule can be viewed here.

      • Web Browsers

        • Spying Browsers

          • Windows 11 blocks Edge browser competitors from opening links

            Something changed between Windows 11 builds 22483 and 22494 (both Windows Insider Preview builds.) The build changelog makes a few mentions of changes to the protocol and file associations/default apps system. However, it omitted the headline news: You can no longer bypass Microsoft Edge using apps like EdgeDeflector.

            [...]

            Before discussing the changes in the latest Windows builds, I’d like to refresh your memory on Microsoft’s earlier escapades with antitrust regulators. I’m not a lawyer, but some case law is common knowledge in the tech field. I’m, of course, thinking of United States versus Microsoft (2001) and Microsoft versus European Commission (2009). In both cases, regulators found that Microsoft was abusing its market-leading operating system to unfairly promote its Internet Explorer (now called Edge) browser; disadvantaging competing web browsers.

            While the US decided not to take action against Microsoft on this point, the EU didn’t hold back. Microsoft agreed to hide shortcuts to Internet Explorer and show customers in the EU the infamous browser ballot screen. The dialog listed Internet Explorer among competitors and asked them to choose what browser they wanted to one-click install.

          • Firefox’s Private Browsing mode upleveled for you

            There are plenty of reasons why you might want to keep something you are doing on the web to yourself. You might be looking for a ring for your soon-to-be fiance, looking up what those mysterious skin rashes could be, or reading a salacious celebrity gossip blog. That’s where Private Browsing mode comes in handy. This year, we upleveled and added new advanced features to our Private Browsing mode. Before we share more about these new features we wanted to share some of the misconceptions about Private Browsing.

            One of the top common myths about Private Browsing (in any major web browser) is that it makes you anonymous on the Internet. The Private Browsing mode on Chrome, Safari, Edge and Firefox are primarily designed to keep your activity private from other users on the same computer, but websites and Internet service providers can still gather information about your visit, even if you are not signed in. To learn more about other Common Myths, visit our site. You should know though, that Firefox offers something that other browsers don’t, which is advanced privacy protections. Read on to learn more about our unique tracking protections.

          • Mozilla submits comments to the California Privacy Protection Agency - Open Policy & Advocacy

            This week, Mozilla submitted comments in response to the California Privacy Protection Agency’s Invitation for Preliminary Comments on Proposed Rulemaking Under the California Privacy Rights Act (CPRA).

            Mozilla has long been a supporter of data privacy laws that empower people, including the trailblazing California privacy laws, California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) and California Privacy Rights Act (CPRA). We welcome the opportunity to offer feedback as California considers how to best evolve its privacy protections, and we support the progress made thus far, particularly as federal efforts languish — but there’s more to do.

      • SaaS/Back End/Databases

        • PostgreSQL 14.1, 13.5, 12.9, 11.14, 10.19, and 9.6.24 Released!

          The PostgreSQL Global Development Group has released an update to all supported versions of our database system, including 14.1, 13.5, 12.9, 11.14, 10.19, and 9.6.24. This release closes two security vulnerabilities and fixes over 40 bugs reported over the last three months.

          Additionally, this is the final release of PostgreSQL 9.6. If you are running PostgreSQL 9.6 in a production environment, we suggest that you make plans to upgrade.

      • Education

        • ITFlow: an Open-source system for MSPs and IT departments

          ITFlow is a software package to help manage IT departments, IT service companies, computer shops, computer maintenance shops, and MSPs (Managed Service Providers).

          It is the open-source self-hosted equivalent and alternative to the popular IT management system “ITGlue”.

          ITFlow is a web-based self-hosted IT-asset management system that users can download, install and configure on a local or a remote system.

      • Programming/Development

        • How Learning Linux Will Improve Your Software Testing

          One of the skills mentioned in the tester profile is the knowledge of Linux commands. It is important since being an open-source OS, Linux offers more possibilities for both developers and testers in terms of immersing deep into the development environment and being restricted close to nothing, due to its plethora of tools and perspectives to learn.

          When having a solid command of Linux commands ( no pun intended) one might engage in performing backend testing ( e.g. fetching and verifying logs), getting involved with real-time projects, testing in Domains like Telecom, Big Data.

        • Twelve Years of Go

          Today we celebrate the twelfth birthday of the Go open source release. We have had an eventful year and have a lot to look forward to next year.

          The most visible change here on the blog is our new home on go.dev, part of consolidating all our Go web sites into a single, coherent site. Another part of that consolidation was replacing godoc.org with pkg.go.dev.

          In February, the Go 1.16 release added macOS ARM64 support, added a file system interface and embedded files, and enabled modules by default, along with the usual assortment of improvements and optimizations.

          In August, the Go 1.17 release added Windows ARM64 support, made TLS cipher suite decisions easier and more secure, introduced pruned module graphs to make modules even more efficient in large projects, and added new, more readable build constraint syntax. Under the hood, Go 1.17 also switched to a register-based calling convention for Go functions on x86-64, improving performance in CPU-bound applications by 5–15%.

          Over the course of the year, we published many new tutorials, a guide to databases in Go, a guide to developing modules, and a Go modules reference. One highlight is the new tutorial “Developing a RESTful API with Go and Gin”, which is also available in interactive form using Google Cloud Shell.

          We’ve been busy on the IDE side, enabling gopls by default in VS Code Go and delivering countless improvements to both gopls and VS Code Go, including a powerful debugging experience powered by Delve.

        • Twelve Years of Go (The Go blog)

          On November 10, the Go programming language community celebrated the 12th anniversary of its release as open-source software.

        • Arm Cortex-A710 Support Merged Into GCC 12 Compiler - Phoronix

          Announced back in May was the Cortex-A710 as the first-generation Armv9 "big" core and successor to the Cortex-A78. The initial Cortex-A710 support is now present in the GCC 12 code compiler.

          Last month Armv9 and Cortex-A710 support began landing in the GNU Toolchain, first up with Binutils. This week the GNU Compiler Collection then introduced the -march=armv9-a targeting support and now the Cortex-A710 support has been merged.

        • Live Debugging Techniques for the Linux Kernel, Part 3 of 3
        • Qt Creator 6 RC released

          We are happy to announce the release of Qt Creator 6 RC!

        • ClusterFuzzLite: Continuous fuzzing for all

          In recent years, continuous fuzzing has become an essential part of the software development lifecycle. By feeding unexpected or random data into a program, fuzzing catches bugs that would otherwise slip through the most thorough manual checks and provides coverage that would take staggering human effort to replicate. NIST’s guidelines for software verification, recently released in response to the White House Executive Order on Improving the Nation’s Cybersecurity, specify fuzzing among the minimum standard requirements for code verification.

          Today, we are excited to announce ClusterFuzzLite, a continuous fuzzing solution that runs as part of CI/CD workflows to find vulnerabilities faster than ever before. With just a few lines of code, GitHub users can integrate ClusterFuzzLite into their workflow and fuzz pull requests to catch bugs before they are committed, enhancing the overall security of the software supply chain.

        • Google Rolls Out ClusterFuzzLite For Easy-To-Use, Continuous Fuzzing - Phoronix

          As part of Google's effort around fuzzing for improving open-source security, the company today announced ClusterFuzzLite as their new, easy-to-use solution for fuzzing open and closed-source projects with ease as part of the CI/CD process.

  • Leftovers

    • Hardware

      • Scientific Honesty And Quantum Computing’s Latest Theoretical Hurdle | Hackaday

        uantum computers are really in their infancy. If you created a few logic gates with tubes back in the 1930s, it would be difficult to predict all the ways we would use computers today. However, you could probably guess where at least some of the problems would lie in the future. One of the things we are pretty sure will limit quantum computer development is error correction.

        As far as we know, every quantum qubit we’ve come up with so far is very fragile and prone to random errors. That’s why every practical design today incorporates some sort of QEC — quantum error correction. Of course, error correction isn’t news. We use it all the time on unreliable storage media or communication channels and high-reliability memory. The problem is, you can’t directly clone a qubit (a quantum bit), so it is hard to use traditional error correction techniques with qubits.

    • Integrity/Availability

      • Proprietary

        • Pseudo-Open Source

        • Security

          • Hijacking smart luggage

            When is a vulnerability not a vulnerability? I’m not sure this counts as a vuln per-se, but some easily-fixed and simple manufacturer mistakes result in trivial hijack of…. yes… your smart luggage.

            The Airwheel SR5 is the first smart luggage that we’ve seen. It can automatically follow the owner through an airport, avoiding obstacles along the way.

            [...]

            The owner wears a watch-style BLE device that the luggage will ‘home in’ on. As the wearer walks off, the luggage pays attention and follows.

            The luggage has four ultrasonic sensors for obstacle avoidance. In practice, we found the luggage would often take random turns in to walls and crash. This may be a result of RF signal interference or reflections. Hard to say without spending a lot of time on it. It also got ‘lost’ quite a bit, meaning the owner had to return to the luggage to get it to start following again.

            Anyway, there is no security for the pairing process for the luggage to the wristband. No particular issue there, as it’s highly unlikely someone else would be trying to pair their luggage at the same time as you in the same location.

          • Securing your digital life, part one: The basics | Ars Technica

            I spend most of my time these days investigating the uglier side of digital life—examining the techniques, tools, and practices of cyber criminals to help people better defend against them. It’s not entirely different from my days at Ars Technica, but it has given me a greater appreciation for just how hard it is for normal folks to stay “safe” digitally.

            Even those who consider themselves well educated about cyber crime and security threats—and who do everything they’ve been taught to do—can (and do!) still end up as victims. The truth is that, with enough time, resources, and skill, everything can be hacked.

            The key to protecting your digital life is to make it as expensive and impractical as possible for someone bent on mischief to steal the things most important to your safety, financial security, and privacy. If attackers find it too difficult or expensive to get your stuff, there's a good chance they'll simply move on to an easier target. For that reason, it’s important to assess the ways that vital information can be stolen or leaked—and understand the limits to protecting that information.

          • Security updates for Thursday

            Security updates have been issued by Debian (icinga2, libxstream-java, ruby-kaminari, and salt), Fedora (awscli, cacti, cacti-spine, python-boto3, python-botocore, radeontop, and rust), Mageia (firefox, libesmtp, libzapojit, sssd, and thunderbird), openSUSE (samba and samba and ldb), SUSE (firefox, pcre, qemu, samba, and samba and ldb), and Ubuntu (firejail, linux-bluefield, linux-gke-5.4, linux-oracle, linux-oracle-5.4, linux-oem-5.10, linux-oem-5.14, and python-py).

          • BIOS Updates Begin Appearing For New Intel Privilege Escalation Vulnerabilities - Phoronix

            OEMs have begun releasing updated BIOS/firmware revisions to address new security vulnerabilities disclosed this week by Intel. Most pressing are potential security vulnerabilities within the BIOS reference code used by various Intel CPUs that could lead to privilege escalation by local users and ranked a "high" impact severity.

            INTEL-SA-00562 was made public on Tuesday around security vulnerabilities in the BIOS reference code for processors ranging from 3rd Gen Xeon Scalable to 11th Gen Core to Celeron and Pentium processors... Rather broad exposure across Intel CPU product lines for recent generations and going back to at least the likes of the 7th Gen Core processors.

            The vulnerabilities in the BIOS reference code could lead to privilege escalation of local users and carries a CVSS base score of "high" at 8.2 for both CVEs. CVE-2021-0157 is tracking insufficient control flow management in this BIOS firmware and CVE-2021-0158 is for improper input validation by the BIOS firmware.

          • VMware Releases Security Advisory

            VMware has released a security advisory to address a privilege escalation vulnerability in vCenter Server and Cloud Foundation. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability to take control of an affected system.

          • Apple Releases Security Update for iCloud for Windows 13 | CISA

            Apple has released a security update to address multiple vulnerabilities in iCloud for Windows 13. An attacker could exploit these vulnerabilities to take control of an affected system.

          • What Happens If Time Gets Hacked
          • BusyBox flaws highlight need for consistent IoT updates | CSO Online

            Security researchers have found and reported 14 vulnerabilities in the BusyBox userspace tool that's used in millions of embedded devices running Linux-based firmware. While the flaws don't have high criticality, some of them do have the potential to result in remote code execution (RCE).

            BusyBox is a software utilities suite that its creators describe as the Swiss army knife of embedded Linux. It contains implementations of the most common Linux command-line tools, together with a shell and a DHCP client and server, all packaged as a single binary. BusyBox has become a de facto standard in the embedded Linux userspace, its standalone binary having support for over 300 common Linux commands.

    • Monopolies

      • Trademarks

        • Facebook In Legal Trouble For Stealing Meta Name - Invidious

          Recently Facebook decided to pull a google and create Meta a parent company to continue invading everybodies privacy while pretending like Facebook no longer does so and there's been some controversy about the name with one so called company claiming that there name was stolen.



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