05.16.22

GNU/Linux

• Desktop/Laptop

  • ZDNet ☛ These two Linux desktops are the simplest picks for new users

    Let’s face it, any time you come across articles that offer advice on choosing the right Linux distribution, they tend to get bogged down in a lot of technical advice that rarely (if ever) applies to those who’ve never experienced Linux. They’ll speak of things like rolling releases, package managers, kernels, open-source licensing, and other features and ideologies that not only have little bearing on those new to Linux and open-source technology but mire the decision in unnecessary complications.

    I want to take a very different approach, one that should make the process quite simple for anyone looking to dive into the world of desktop Linux for the first time. I’m going to shrug off the usual advice and aim straight for the heart of the matter. What exactly is that matter?

• Audiocasts/Shows

  • Late Night Linux – Episode 177 – Late Night Linux

    Graham plays with a synth, old desktops live on, Generation X11 yells at cloud, Will has been a naughty boy, TV alternatives, and Linux on weird hardware.

  • Video ☛ Where Do You Go After The Ancient Thinkpads – Invidious

    I’ve never understood why so may Linux users like buying ancient thinkpads but it is what it is, but that got me thinking, what in the world is the plan after these devices are gone where do you go then

• Applications

  • What you’ll find inside Inkscape version 1.2 | Inkscape

    Our annual Spring release has left the building! From offering multiple pages to making tiling super easy and fun, Inkscape 1.2 has something for everyone seeking to Draw Freely.

    What’s not making a comeback are many of the bugs that were fixed thanks to everyone who tested the earlier versions and shared their feedback with the Inkscape teams. This helps us to improve the program between alpha, beta and final releases.

    While we cannot possibly mention everything inside version 1.2 in an article, we suggest a test drive of the actual software. Before you download it – or as it’s downloading – we suggest checking out our Inkscape 1.2 video specially prepared to demonstrate some of the most popular new features and updates.

  • 9to5Linux ☛ Inkscape 1.2 Released with Support for Multi-Page Documents, Numerous Enhancements

    Coming almost a year after Inkscape 1.1, the Inkscape 1.2 release is here to introduce a new Page tool that implements support for multiple pages in Inkscape documents. To access the new Page tool, click on the lowest button in the toolbar. The tool also lets you import and export multi-page PDF documents.

    Also new in Inkscape 1.2 is a ‘Tiling’ Live Path Effect (LPE) that allows for interactive tiling, the ability to import SVG images from Open Clipart, Wikimedia Commons, and other online sources, on-canvas alignment snapping, as well as the ability to edit markers and dash patterns.

  • Medevel ☛ Surf Ice is an open-source brain surface renderer

    Surf Ice, an open-source software package for visualizing connectome networks, tractography and statistical maps on top of anatomical brain images.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • ByteXD ☛ Comprehensive Guide to Using FFmpeg to Convert Media Files

    FFmpeg is one of those modern marvels of open source software. It is a suite of libraries and smaller programs to handle video and audio files primarily.

    It works with images and other multimedia files such as video streaming formats. It has lots of uses like video transcoding, video editing, video scaling, video cropping or other video manipulation work.

    At its heart FFmpeg is a command line tool used with the ffmpeg command.

    It has a basic simple video player and ability to probe video media information for analysis.

    FFmpeg is also included in the workflow of other software like the popular video player VLC. Enterprise companies like YouTube use it in their core processing when ingesting video uploads.
    Overall FFmpeg can play, record, convert, and stream audio and video. It includes libavcodec – the leading audio/video codec library.

    In this tutorial we’ll install FFmpeg and learn how to use some its most popular features through practical examples and detailed explanations.

  • Network World ☛ Extracting substrings on Linux [Ed: This should say "GNU", not "Linux"]

    There are many ways to extract substrings from lines of text using Linux and doing so can be extremely useful when preparing scripts that may be used to process large amounts of data. This post describes ways you can take advantage of the commands that make extracting substrings easy.

  • HowTo Forge ☛ How to Install WordPress with Apache and Let’s Encrypt SSL on Ubuntu 22.04

  • Linux Made Simple ☛ How to install Godot Mono 3.4.4 on a Chromebook

  • Video ☛ How to install Steam Link on Debian 11 – Invidious

    In this video, we are looking at how to install Steam Link on Debian 11.

  • ID Root ☛ How To Install MongoDB on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS

    In this tutorial, we will show you how to install MongoDB on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, MongoDB is a document-oriented NoSQL database used for high-volume data storage. Instead of using tables and rows as in the traditional relational databases. MongoDB is available in two editions: Community and Enterprise.

    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 MongoDB NoSQL database server on Ubuntu 22.04 (Jammy Jellyfish). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 22.04 and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint, Elementary OS, Pop!_OS, and more as well.

  • ByteXD ☛ How to Install Python Pip on Ubuntu

    Pip is the recommended package installer for python, with which you can install any python library or package that is present in the Python Package Index (and other indexes).

    Pip is a command-line tool that is cross-platform, featuring easy-to-use commands to manage your python packages. Like Python, pip has two versions, Pip 3 for Python 3 and Pip 2 for Python 2.

    This article explains how to install both of them in Ubuntu 20.04 (the guide works for other releases of Ubuntu and most Debian-based distros).

  • Using a Linux phone as a secondary monitor

    As a software developer on the go, one of the very first use cases that I started investigating after installing Linux on my first tablet was that of using a portable device as a secondary display for another Linux machine. Ideally, this would happen wirelessly (or wired, if that involved lower power consumption), with unnoticeable delay, and – why not – even including real-time touchscreen input.

    The journey, however, took longer than planned. Existing solutions, like VNC, tend to be strangely laggy, and others, like Miracast, are so deeply enclosed in proprietary protocols that they do not scale well to a bug-free experience on all devices. The first solution to this problem, at an even less stable stage than currently, was my most shared post ever on Twitter, so I decided to write a post on how this was done.

  • Video ☛ Easily Add Startup Sounds To Your Linux Desktop – Invidious

    One of the most striking features of operating systems of the past were the startup sounds when you logged into your computer. For whatever reason, most Linux desktops don’t incorporate a startup sound. But we can easily add one, regardless of distribution or desktop environment or window manager.

Distributions and Operating Systems

• Why Blueman Notifications Stay Forever

  For many years, Puppy Linux had no Bluetooth support. But lately, a user has complained about (the recently added) Blueman: it shows a notification, which don’t disappear until you restart X. For some reason, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth are super unreliable in this apartment (and I can’t wait until we finally move to our new apartment in the summer), so I constantly have to close these distracting and useless notifications about connections and disconnections. I didn’t have to do anything to reproduce the problem.

• BSD

  • FreeBSD ☛ FreeBSD 13.1-RELEASE Announcement

    The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is pleased to announce the availability of FreeBSD 13.1-RELEASE. This is the second release of the stable/13 branch.

  • FreeBSD ☛ FreeBSD 13.1-RELEASE Release Notes

    The release notes for FreeBSD 13.1-RELEASE contain a summary of the changes made to the FreeBSD base system on the 13-STABLE development line. This document lists applicable security advisories that were issued since the last release, as well as significant changes to the FreeBSD kernel and userland. Some brief remarks on upgrading are also presented.

  • FreeBSD ☛ FreeBSD 13.1-RELEASE Errata

    This document lists errata items for FreeBSD 13.1-RELEASE, containing significant information discovered after the release or too late in the release cycle to be otherwise included in the release documentation. This information includes security advisories, as well as news relating to the software or documentation that could affect its operation or usability. An up-to-date version of this document should always be consulted before installing this version of FreeBSD.

  • FreeBSD ☛ Release Information

    FreeBSD releases are classified into Production Releases and Legacy Releases. Production releases are best suited to users looking for the latest new features. Legacy releases are for users wishing to stay with a more conservative upgrade strategy.

• Fedora Family / IBM

  • Ben Williams: F36-20220516 updated Live isos released

    The Fedora Respins SIG is pleased to announce the latest release of Updated F36-20220516-Live ISOs, carrying the 5.17.6-300 kernel.

    This set of updated isos will save considerable amounts of updates after install. ((for new installs.)(New installs of Workstation have about 1GB of updates savings )).

  • ZDNet ☛ Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.6: Better security, more options

    Do you want a solid Linux distribution that also delivers the latest languages and solid security? Yes? Then consider getting Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.6.

    Red Hat announced this new release at the Red Hat Summit. It has numerous new features, but the ones that caught my eye were the security improvements.

  • Silicon Angle ☛ OS consistency solves Linux talent issues, says RHEL executive

    The new Red Hat Enterprise Linux, released during the recent Red Hat Summit, caters to rapidly escalating hardware development occurring throughout tech, along with a growing Linux admin skills shortage.

    RHEL 9 performs the combo double act, in part, by more efficiently optimizing the operating system, according to Gunnar Hellekson (pictured), general manager of the Enterprise Linux Business Unit at Red Hat Inc. Upgrading to the new OS means enterprises can get by with fewer admins. A skills shortage is caused, in part, by a lack of U.S. visas.

• Debian Family

  • Linuxiac ☛ Kali Linux 2022.2 Comes with the Latest GNOME and KDE Desktop Environments

    This year’s second Kali Linux update, 2022.2, brings the latest GNOME 42 and KDE Plasma 5.24 desktop environments and many other improvements.

    Kali Linux is a popular operating system designed for security professionals and Linux enthusiasts. It is a Debian-based distribution developed, funded, and maintained by Offensive Security.

    Following the February release of version 2022.1, the new Kali Linux 2022.2 update significantly improves the user experience for all fans of this security-oriented Linux distribution.

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• GNU Projects

  • Hackers getting married

    We had several of our old-time friends from the GNU Project, and some guests with young children still unused to such an international context who soon enough learned to enjoy the sound of different languages and the happy chaos of people meeting for the first time, some more traditional if not formal, others fun and weird.

Leftovers

• Consequentialist Passengers

  I enjoyed the 2016 space movie Passengers. It was hated online because the character Jim Preston does something very cruel and selfish but the movie tries to redeem him and his choice, and presents him as a sympathetic viewpoint character. And I agree with the criticism.

  I like space movies so I saw it anyway. The way I managed to get over it, and to get to enjoy the movie, was by just not consider the character very redeemed. Movies can have villains. He is just a villain whom I could fear and root against and I could get over (or not fall for) the movie’s editing decisions and soundtrack cues and the decisions of other characters. I was going against the obvious intent of the movie, I was “changing it” in my li’l viewer head, but the only “edit“ I needed to do was to let myself feel the way I felt about Jim (creeped out) instead of trying to contort my brain and heart into going where the movie wanted me to go.

• Security

  • USCERT ☛ CISA Adds Two Known Exploited Vulnerabilities to Catalog [Ed: VMware in trouble again]

    CISA has added two new vulnerabilities to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities Catalog, based on evidence of active exploitation. These types of vulnerabilities are a frequent attack vector for malicious cyber actors and pose significant risk to the federal enterprise. Note: to view the newly added vulnerabilities in the catalog, click on the arrow on the of the “Date Added to Catalog” column, which will sort by descending dates.

• Internet/Gemini

  • Dig Deeper Should Be Taken With A Grain Of Salt

    Sure, Tutanota doesn’t offer POP/IMAP/SMTP, but at least when using it I can be sure that my emails are making it to their destinations and that I’m receiving everything that’s been sent to me. In contrast, I’ve encountered one reliability issue after another with cock.li over a period of a couple of years.

  • Hello Web!

    Maybe it’s because I’m trying to put off other things I should be doing, but I set up a website where I’ll be mirroring some of my logs from my gemini capsule to.

  • Desktop Backdrops

    I was hoping to have had time to edit and upload the next couple of hiking videos — the Lake District is nothing if not picturesque — but life’s got in the way. What I have started doing, though, is taking some panoramas to use as desktop backdrops. A few of these have come out really well, so I thought I’d share.