January 22, 2022 will be the 24th anniversary of the publication of the first LWN.net Weekly Edition. A lot has happened in the intervening years; the Linux community has grown immeasurably, and LWN has grown with it. Later this year will also be the 20th anniversary of the adoption of our subscription-based model, which has sustained LWN ever since. There is a change coming for our subscribers that will, with luck, help to set up LWN to thrive in the next coming years.
The nominal price for an LWN subscription is $7 per month, a price that has remained unchanged since 2010. That $7 buys a lot less now than it did twelve years ago. Your editor is reliably informed by the Internet that inflation in the US has been just under 28% from 2010 until the middle of 2021; that rate doesn't include the last few months. Prices for some things, most notably health insurance in the US, have increased by rather more than that.
This release fixes the security vulnerability described in our January 18th post, ISTIO-SECURITY-2022-001 as well as a few minor bug fixes to improve robustness. This release note describes what’s different between Istio 1.12.1 and Istio 1.12.2.
To finish off our video editing series for the Librem 14, Gardiner Bryant dives into rendering settings. Learn to use in and out zones and how best to render your finished video in Kdenlive. Rendering is resource-intensive on any laptop, which is why we recommend Librem 14. This video will help those looking to level up their overall video production. We hope to do similar projects like this in the future, so if you have ideas for topics you’d like us to cover, please let us know!
Back in 2020 the RIAA went after YouTube DL and now there is a followup lawsuit but not filed against the developer instead it's being filed against there hosting provider.
Linux is such a radically different operating system than the proprietary operating systems like Microsoft Windows. Because of this, Linux tends to attract a different kind of user than Windows.
In this video, we are looking at how to install Sublime Text on Elementary OS 6.0.
VirtualBox 6.1.32 arrives almost two months after VirtualBox 6.1.30 to fix a bunch of bugs. For example, it fixes access to some USB devices on Linux hosts as the device class wasn’t handled correctly, fixes the wrong mouse position if guest is in text mode, fixes copying of folders from host to guest and vice versa, and fixes UNICODE handling.
Also fixed in this release is the accidental creation of an empty debug log file when the OSS (Open Sound System) audio backend was configured, the loss of keyboard focus under rare circumstances when using the mini toolbar in full-screen mode, the link status reporting for certain Linux kernels, as well as packaging and installer regressions affecting Solaris hosts.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Ansible on Fedora 35. For those of you who didn’t know, Ansible is an open-source software provisioning, configuration management, and application-deployment tool enabling infrastructure as code. Ansible automates and simplifies repetitive, complex, and tedious operations. It’s a free tool written in Python.
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 Ansible automation tool on a Fedora 35.
In this tutorial, you will learn how to install PHP 8 on Ubuntu 22.04. PHP 8 is a major update of the PHP language. It contains many new features and optimizations including named arguments, union types, attributes, constructor property promotion, match expression, nullsafe operator, JIT, and improvements in the type system, error handling, and consistency.
A Linux OS is a collection of multiple packages interlinked in a very complex network. These packages offer all the necessary files and binaries that make up the operating system. These packages need regular updates. It may be security patches, bug fixes, or feature improvements. As such, it is critical to keep all the packages up-to-date.
Debian 11.0 was released on August 14th, 2021, with the codename Bullseye. After approximately two years of development, the Debian projects presented a stable version of Debian 11 which will be supported for the next five years. This new distribution whips with over 11294 new packages to count 59551 packages.
In this article we will be allowing or denying SSH access to a particular user or Group by making a few changes in SSH Configuration file.
First, we will see how to allow or enable SSH access to a user and group. Please note that all commands given below should be run as root or sudo user.
Hi Guys, In this guide, we will illustrate the difference between shutdown, poweroff, halt and reboot command in Linux.
Hi guys, In this article, we will show you how you can configure time stamp information when each command in the history was executed to be displayed.
All commands executed by Bash on the command line are stored in history or in a file called ~/.bash_history.
Also you can list all of the commands executed by users on the system or a user can view the command history using the history command as shown below.
Gitea an open source easy-to-use self hosted git server written in Go. It has many features like time tracking, repository branching, file logging, notifications, built-in wiki and much more. Gitea is an lightweight application meaning that it can be run on lower spec systems too. It is an great lightweight alternative to GitLab. It’s really easy to setup and you will find most of the features that you will find in typical source control platform. This tutorial will show you how to install Gitea on Ubuntu Or Debian Systems
Kibana is a proprietary data visualization dashboard software for Elasticsearch, whose open source successor in OpenSearch is OpenSearch Dashboards. It is a data visualization and exploration tool used for log and time-series analytics, application monitoring, and operational intelligence use cases. It offers powerful and easy-to-use features such as histograms, line graphs, pie charts, heat maps, and built-in geospatial support. Kibana also acts as the user interface for monitoring, managing, and securing an Elastic Stack cluster — as well as the centralized hub for built-in solutions developed on the Elastic Stack.
HAProxy is a free and open source software that provides a high availability load balancer and proxy server for TCP and HTTP-based applications that spreads requests across multiple servers. It distributes the load among the web and application servers.
Haproxy is popular for load balancing because of its efficiency, reliability, and low memory and CPU footprint. Load balancing is a common solution for distributing web applications horizontally across multiple hosts while providing the users with a single point of access to the service.
It is available for install on major Linux distributions. In this guide we will learn how to install and configure HAProxy load balancer on Ubuntu 20.04.
Did you download an RPM file, and you’re not sure what it is or what do with it? It’s one of the file types used to install applications in Red Hat Enterprise Linux-based distributions, and we’ll show you how to use them.
Did you download an RPM file, and you’re not sure what it is or what do with it? It’s one of the file types used to install applications in Red Hat Enterprise Linux-based distributions, and we’ll show you how to use them.
The new Wine 7.0 release features a year’s worth of development distilled from over 9,000 changes. The goal? To serve you a bold bouquet that’s rich in improvements, new features, and advanced capabilities.
Now, the official release announcement is a little terse, but both the Wine mailing list announcement and the official release notes relay a lot more detail — like ‘best read with a glass of real wine and some nibbles’ detail.
It used to be, people would scoff at the idea of switching to a Linux-based operating system due to a lack of software. While that is still true for some folks -- especially business users -- it is less of a concern these days. Why? Well, so many things are done through the web browser nowadays, lessening dependence on Windows software. For many consumers, just having the Google Chrome browser on, say, Ubuntu, is more than enough to accomplish their wants and needs. Not to mention, there are many quality Linux apps like GIMP and DaVinci Resolve.
But OK, lets say you really want to use a Linux-based operating system, but there's some Windows-only software that you absolutely cannot live without. Thankfully, you may still be able to ditch Windows and upgrade to something like Fedora or Linux Mint. How? Thanks to the excellent Wine! This compatibility layer (don't you dare call it an emulator), can sometimes enable you to run Windows software on Linux. Today, version 7.0 is released.
After a year of development, Wine 7.0 is here to introduce lots of goodies to satisfy your Windows application and gaming needs. First of all, it brings support for the WoW64 (64-bit Windows-on-Windows) architecture to allow you to run 32-bit Windows programs inside a 64-bit Unix host process.
On top of that, Wine 7.0 adds support for multiple displays (multi-head) to its Direct3D implementation to allow you to choose which monitor a Direct3D program will use for full-screen mode, along with display gamma adjustment using the DXGI API, and support for new GPUs.
Version 7.0 of the WINE Windows API library has been released.
The Wine team is proud to announce that the stable release Wine 7.0 is now available.
This release represents a year of development effort and over 9,100 individual changes. It contains a large number of improvements that are listed in the release notes below.
Wine 7.0 is now officially available for enjoying Windows games and applications on Linux, macOS, and other platforms.
Wine 7.0 serves as the annual stable release for "Wine Is Not an Emulator" for running Windows applications/games on other platforms. Wine 7.0 is the culmination of all the bi-weekly Wine 6.x(x) point releases over the past year.
Void Linux is a Linux distribution that aims to provide a powerful, yet easy-to-approach, operating system. It is designed to be both simple and stable and achieves that through the use of runit and its own lightweight package manager.
Similar to Arch Linux, Void Linux follows a “rolling release” model and a “user-centric” approach to operating system usage. This means Void Linux is constantly updated but is also bare-bones when installed. It makes Void Linux appealing for power users who want to have a flexible operating system that they can fully understand and tinker with.
Debian is a great operating system in its own right, but also, it makes for an excellent base for other Linux distributions as well. For example, Ubuntu is probably the most well-known Linux distro and it is based on Debian. There are countless other operating systems, such as Netrunner, that stand on Debian's figurative shoulders.
The prettiest and most exciting Debian-based operating system, however, is deepin. This Chinese-developed Linux distribution is probably the most beautiful desktop operating system on the planet; it is arguably better than both macOS and Windows 11 in the style department.
deepin has what many consider the most beautiful and intuitive user interfaces. Today, deepin 20.4 becomes available and it uses either LTS kernel 5.10.83 or stable kernel 5.15.6. If you are running Windows 11, you should definitely consider switching now!
GeckoLinux ROLLING is derived from the openSUSE Tumbleweed and Packman repositories, which means that if follows a rolling release model where you install once and receive updates forever. But, from time to time, the developer of this distribution generates new installation images for better hardware compatibility.
As such, the new GeckoLinux ROLLING update is here to further improve the Calamares graphical installer to no longer create a Btrfs subvolume for the /tmp directory.
Pine64 launched a $399 “PineNote” tablet with 10.1-inch, E-Ink touchscreen, 4GB LPDDR4, and 128GB eMMC that runs Linux on a Rockchip RK3566. The company also recently launched the $399 PinePhone Pro and a PinePhone Keyboard and a PineDIO USB LoRa adapter.
Pine64 announced its PineNote E-ink reader in August and launched its first developer version of its second-gen PinePhone Pro Explorer Edition smartphone in October. The company has now launched the PineNote for developers only, and recently launched a less bleeding-edge version of PinePhone Pro, which is available for the same $399 price with shipments due in late February (see farther below).
Earlier in the month, Pine64 launched its $50 PinePhone Keyboard case, which supports both the PinePhone and PinePhone Pro. There is also a new, $15 PineDio USB LoRa Adapter that works with any USB-connected device. A $20 case model packages the adapter for use with the PinePhone or PinePhone Pro (see farther below).
Pine64 has a really interesting idea: make cheap hardware with low margins, get it into the hands of the FOSS community, and let them come up with the software. No one has ever done this before, at least not on this scale, and it’s a really neat idea! Pine64 is doing a lot to support the FOSS community bringing up its hardware, but I’m afraid that I have to ask them to do a bit more.
[...]
Again, this is ordered from most to least important, but in practice, the ecosystem prioritizes them in reverse. Pine64 themselves contribute no labor to any of these focus areas, and though they provide some funding, they provide it from the bottom of this list up, putting most of it into distros and very little into the kernel, bootloaders, or telephony. This is nice, but… why fund the distros at all? Distros are not the ones getting results in these focus areas. Their job is to distribute the results of community efforts.
Don’t get me wrong, the distros do an important job and they ought to get the funding they need, but this is just creating fragmentation in the ecosystem. As one example, we could be installing the Linux distribution of our choice on the Pinebook Pro using a standard aarch64 UEFI ISO installer, just like we do for any other laptop, if someone spent a couple of weeks upstreaming the last 6 patches to mainline Linux and put together a suitable u-Boot payload to flash on the SPI flash chip. But, instead of one working solution for everyone, we have 20+ Linux distros publishing Pine64-specific images to flash to microSD cards.
To be shipped with one of the main Linux phone OSes (Manjaro with KDE Plasma, etc).
When you spend a lot of time on the computer doing certain more specialised tasks (no, we’re not talking about browsing cat memes on twitter) you start to think that your basic trackpad or mouse is, let’s say, lacking a certain something. We think that something may be called ‘usability’ or maybe ease-of-use? Any which way, lots of heavy CAD users gush over their favourite mouse stand-ins, and one particularly interesting class of input devices is the Space Mouse, which is essentially patented up-to-the-hilt and available only from 3DConnexion. But what about open source alternatives you can build yourselves? Enter stage left, the Orbion created by [FaqT0tum.] This simple little build combines an analog joystick with a rotary knob, with a rear button and OLED display on the front completing the user interface.
Thanks to Red Hat developer Martin Stránský, he has managed to get the Video Acceleration API (VA-API) working for AV1 content within the Firefox web browser.
After working on it the past month, the necessary bits have come together for supporting AV1 VA-API playback within Firefox on Linux. See the Mozilla.org BugZilla for tracking the progress on the effort. The latest AV1 activity in general for Mozilla can be tracked via hg.mozilla.org.
If you’ve ever built anything with web technologies, you’re probably familiar with MDN Web Docs. With about 13,000 pages documenting how to use programming languages such as HTML, CSS and JavaScript, the site has about 8,000 people using it at any given moment.
MDN relies on contributors to help maintain its ever-expanding and up to date documentation. Supported by companies such as Open Web Docs, Google, w3c, Microsoft, Samsung and Igalia (to name a few), contributions also come from community members. These contributions take many different forms, from fixing issues to contributing code to helping newcomers and localizing content.
We reached out to 4 long-time community contributors to talk about how and why they started contributing, why they kept going, and ask what advice they have for new contributors.
[...]
Since the end of 2020, the translation of MDN articles happen on the new GitHub based platform.
[...]
Our seasoned contributors suggest starting with reporting issues and trying to fix them, follow the issue trackers and getting familiarized with GitHub.
Databases are garnering a lot of popularity every day and are used by many organizations for a wide variety of use cases. Many organizations are employing innovative techniques to handle their Data storage. These companies often shift between Databases to optimize their storage and data mapping according to their business needs.
The next edition of the popular PostgreSQL conference pgDay Paris, a PostgreSQL.Org Recognized Community Conference, will be held on March 24, 2022 in the French capital. All of the talks will be in English.
Registration is open, and the EARLYBIRD discount is going fast so make sure you grab that while you can!
The third Release Candidate (RC3) for WordPress 5.9 is here!
Thank you to everyone who has contributed thus far toward testing and filing bugs to help make WordPress 5.9 a great release. WordPress 5.9 is slated to land in just one week—on January 25, 2022. You still have time to help! Since RC2 arrived last week, testers have found and fixed two bugs, 14 fixes from Gutenberg. There has been one additional Gutenberg fix today.
The board of the Free Software Foundation (FSF) announced today that associate members of the FSF will be able to nominate and evaluate candidates for the nonprofit's board of directors for the first time in the organization's 37-year history. FSF currently has just over 5,000 associate members.
Under new procedures adopted by the FSF board on January 17 and summarized here, the organization will proactively engage associate members with a sufficient history of association with the FSF in the recruiting process by inviting them to suggest board nominees and then research collectively those nominees' suitability for a position on the board, including most importantly their record of commitment to free software ideals.
The new community engagement process is a key result of a six-month consultant-led review designed to help make FSF governance and recruitment practices more transparent and participatory, while more systematically ensuring their commitment to the FSF's values and principles.
You may have heard about socket programming in C. One of the socket functions is the “sigprocmask” function. This function has been usually utilized in the code to inspect or alter the signal mask of the calling function. The signal mask is a term used for a group of signals that are presently blocked and cannot be conveyed for the calling function. Such kind of signal is known as “Blocked Signals.” You can say that a process can still receive the blocked signals, but it will not be used until they are unblocked and released, i.e., raised. Until then, it will be pending. Therefore, within today’s guide, we will be discussing the use of the sigprocmask function in C programming. Let’s have a start.
After the Ubuntu 20.04 successful login, you need to launch the shell of the Ubuntu 20.04 system first after the login. So, try out the “Ctrl+Alt+T” shortcut simply on the desktop screen. It will launch the terminal shell for you in some seconds. Make sure to update your system using the apt package of your system. After that, you have to execute the “touch” instruction along with the file name you want to generate, i.e., to create the C file via the shell. This newly created file can be found in the “home” folder of your system’s file explorer. You can try opening it with the “text” editor to create code in it. Another way to open it in the shell is using the “GNU Nano” editor using the “nano” keyword with a file name as demonstrated beneath.
A sigaction() is a function that allows to call/observe or examine a specific action associated with a particular signal. It is thought to consider a signal and sigaction function on the same page. But in reality, it has not occurred. The signal() function does not block other signals when the current handler’s execution is under process. At the same time, the sigaction function can block other signals until the current handler has returned.
As I have been griping on Twitter lately, about how I dislike the design of modern UNIX operating systems, an interesting conversation about object capabilities came up with the author of musl-libc. This conversation caused me to realize that systems programmers don’t really have a understanding of object capabilities, and how they can be used to achieve environments that are aligned with the principle of least authority.
In general, I think this is largely because we’ve failed to effectively disseminate the research output in this area to the software engineering community at large — for various reasons, people complete their distributed systems degrees and go to work in decentralized finance, as unfortunately, Coinbase pays better. An unfortunate reality is that the security properties guaranteed by Web3 platforms are built around object capabilities, by necessity – the output of a transaction, which then gets consumed for another transaction, is a form of object capability. And while Web3 is largely a planet-incinerating Ponzi scheme run by grifters, object capabilities are a useful concept for building practical security into real-world systems.
Most literature on this topic try to describe these concepts in the framing of, say, driving a car: by default, nobody has permission to drive a given car, so it is compliant with the principle of least authority, meanwhile the car’s key can interface with the ignition, and allow the car to be driven. In this example, the car’s key is an object capability: it is an opaque object, that can be used to acquire the right to drive the car. Afterwards, they usually go on to describe the various aspects of their system without actually discussing why anybody would want this.
Sometimes the text-processing problems posted on Stack Exchange have so many solutions, it's hard to decide which is best.
A problem like that was posted in the "Unix & Linux" section in December 2021...
As peripherals go, few are hacked on more than keyboards. The layouts, the shapes, the sizes, materials, and even the question of what a keyboard is are all on the table for tinkering. In that vein, [TaylorConor] released his simplified keyboard called the threeboard on GitHub, having only three keys and replicating a full keyboard.
We’ve covered keyboards built with chording in mind, wrapped around coffee cups, and keyboards with joysticks for added speed. So why cover this one? What makes it different? The execution is superb and is a great example to look at next time you’re making a project you want to show off. The keyboard is just three mechanical switches, two 8-bit binary displays (16 LEDs total), three status LEDs, and three LEDs showing the current layer (four layers). The detailed user’s manual explains it all. There is a reliable Atmega32U4 microcontroller and two EEPROM chips at its heart.
We all have that one project on our minds that we’d love to build if we could just find the right combination of time, energy, and knowledge to dive right in. For [Jonathan], that project was a sound sculpture that’s finally made it from concept to complete. [Jonathan] describes the sound sculpture as the culmination of a decade of learning, and in a moment you’ll understand why.
The sculpture itself is a beautiful display of woodwork mixed with what appear to be individually addressable LED’s. The varying length of the individual enclosures evokes the idea that the sculpture is somehow involved in the sound production, which is a nice touch.
It’s now possible to add 10GbE through an M.2 socket thanks to Innodisk EGPL-T101 M.2 2280 module based on Marvell AQtion Ethernet controller offering support for 10Gbps, 5Gbps, 2.5Gbps, 1000M, and 100M/10M LAN speeds.
The solution is comprised of three parts with the M.2 module equipped with a heatsink to cool the Ethernet controller, a flexible high-speed coaxial cable, and a daughter board with an RJ45 connector and two threads for mounting to a chassis.
Isn’t it just fantastic when a project finally does what you wanted it to do in the first place? [Simon Merrett] isn’t willing to compromise when it comes to the Aerodox. His original vision for the keyboard was a wireless, ergonomic split that could easily switch between a couple of PCs. Whereas some people are more into making layout after layout, [Simon] keeps pushing forward with this same design, which is sort of a mashup between the ErgoDox and the Redox, which is itself a wireless version of the ErgoDox.
I’ve been following the development of KiCAD for a number of years now, and using it as my main electronics CAD package daily for a the last six years or thereabouts, so the release of KiCAD 6.0 is quite exciting to an electronics nerd like me. The release date had been pushed out a bit, as this is such a huge update, and has taken a little longer than anticipated. But, it was finally tagged and pushed out to distribution on Christmas day, with some much deserved fanfare in the usual places.
So now is a good time to look at which features are new in KiCAD 6.0 — actually 6.0.1 is the current release at time of writing due to some bugfixes — and which features originally planned for 6.0 are now being postponed to the 7.0 roadmap and beyond.
An electronic leadscrew is an increasingly popular project for small and mid-sized lathes. They do away with the need to swap gears in and out to achieve the proper ratio between spindle speed and tool carriage translation, and that makes threading a snap. But well-designed electronic leadscrews, like this one from [Hobby Machinist], offer so much more than just easy threading.
The first thing that struck us about this build was the polished, professional look of it. The enclosure for the Nucleo-64 dev board sports a nice TFT display and an IP65-rated keyboard, as well as a beefy-looking jog wheel. The spindle speed is monitored by a 600 pulses-per-revolution optical encoder, and the lathe’s leadscrew is powered by a closed-loop NEMA 24 stepper. This combination allows for the basic threading operations, but the addition of a powered cross slide opens up a ton more functionality. Internal and external tapers are a few keypresses away, as are boring and turning and radius operations, both on the right and on the left. The video below shows radius-cutting operations combined to turn a sphere.
Let’s make one thing abundantly clear. We do not, under any circumstances, recommend you replace your existing collection of wrenches with ones made out of PCBs. However, as creator [Ben Nyx] explains, they do make for an extremely cheap and lightweight temporary tool that would be perfect for distributing with DIY kits.
I’ll admit that we never “got there” from a governance standpoint with those Linux devices; a silo was predestined because we were built around Active Directory domain controllers that shunned Linux devices.
The path forward will require collaboration from companies and organizations that consume and ship open source software, said Joe Brockmeier, Vice President Marketing & Publicity at Apache Software Foundation. “There's no single "silver bullet" to get there, and it will take all of our organizations working together to improve the open source supply chain.”
CISA has added 13 new vulnerabilities to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities Catalog, based on evidence that threat actors are actively exploiting the vulnerabilities listed in the table below. These types of vulnerabilities are a frequent attack vector for malicious cyber actors of all types and pose significant risk to the federal enterprise.
In response to recent malicious cyber incidents in Ukraine—including the defacement of government websites and the presence of potentially destructive malware on Ukrainian systems—CISA has published CISA Insights: Implement Cybersecurity Measures Now to Protect Against Potential Critical Threats.
Every operating system should have security controls deployed, and Linux is no exception. Having a lock screen policy is even more of a consideration with a remote workforce where team members could be using a local coffee shop or other unsecured locations as an “office,” which increases the odds that bad actors could obtain physical access to devices. JumpCloud has created an easy-to-deploy policy to configure lock screen settings for Linux throughout your fleet, providing consistent governance and a scalable method for a secure OS configuration.
Oracle has released its Critical Patch Update for January 2022 to address 497 vulnerabilities across multiple products. A remote attacker could exploit some of these vulnerabilities to take control of an affected system.
But as a "preventative measure", 2,000 hamsters and other small mammals in the city will be killed. The animals are spread across 34 different pet shops and animal storage centres.
This week Techspot reported that DRM-laden Ultra HD Blu-ray Discs won’t play anymore on computers using the latest Intel Core processors. You may have skimmed right past it, but the table on page 51 of the latest 12th Generation Intel Core Processor data sheet (184 page PDF) informs us that the Intel Software Guard Extensions (SGX) have been deprecated. These extensions are required for DRM processing on these discs, hence the problem. The SGX extensions were introduced with the sixth generation of Intel Core Skylake processors in 2015, the same year as Ultra HD Blu-ray, aka 4K Blu-ray. But there have been numerous vulnerabilities discovered in the intervening years. Not only Intel, but AMD has had similar issues as we wrote about in October.
