05.19.22

Desktop/Laptop

• OMG Ubuntu ☛ You Can Upgrade Framework, the Modular Laptop, with 12th Gen Intel CPUs

  So when I heard they’d announced an upgraded Framework laptop I was intrigued. Given the nature of the product, I wondered if the upgraded components provided would be backwards-compatible with the first generation device?

  To quench any intrigue you may have the answer is a big fat yes.

Audiocasts/Shows

• Video ☛ Building a GTK App With Haskell (In Under An Hour) – Invidious

  A couple of months back, I did a video on creating my very first GTK app using Haskell. And it was a lot of fun! So let’s continue along on this journey. Today, I’m creating a GTK app in less than an hour from start to finish using Haskell. You can do this too! You won’t need to really know much about GTK or Haskell to follow along with me for this one.

• Video ☛ Please Stop Trolling Nvidia Open Source Driver – Invidious

  Nvidia has been receiving a lot of positive responses on there open source driver project but they’ve also had plenty of people trolling the repo and if you’re one of the people doing this please stop, you’re not helping anyone.

• Video ☛ PSA: You (probably) don’t want this SD card for your Steam Deck. – Invidious

• Jupiter Broadcasting ☛ Linux Action News 241

  Why Google’s new open-source security effort might fall a bit short, the Arch snag this week, a big win for Right to Repair, and why you might soon have a new favorite filesystem.

• Video ☛ Microsoft’s distros, Budgie on Fedora, Rocky Linux funding – Linux and open source news – Invidious

Kernel Space

• LWN ☛ LWN.net Weekly Edition for May 12, 2022

Applications

• ByteXD ☛ What Is Inkscape and What Can You Do With It?

  The first time I heard the word Inkscape, I thought it was Ink-escape, alluding to the ease of use of the software, just like an imaginary ink escaping from your mind to the software to bring forth the magnificent design ideas from your imagination.

  I was disappointed to know it wasn’t the idea behind the name, but fortunately the software is as easy to use as I imagined.
  And the name is combined from two words “ink” and “scape”; ink is used for final products in design, so suggesting the practical aspect of the software that it is used for creating ready-for-use illustrations and designs, and scape denoting a scene of a large number of objects, thus alludes to the object-oriented nature to vector graphics.

  Inkscape is an open-source vector graphics editor.

  What are vector graphics? Vector graphics, opposing to raster graphics, use mathematical equations to describe paths and objects instead of pixels, which leads to unlimited resolution, yes! No matter how you zoom in; these don’t pixelate.
  Inkscape is free of charge, meaning that you don’t pay a dime to download and use Inkscape.

  Now you may think that most open-source applications are counter-productive; because they don’t have enough features. But I am telling you, that is not the case with Inkscape.

• Medevel ☛ Docspell is a machine learning powered document management system (DMS)

  Docspell is a personal document organizer. Or sometimes called a “Document Management System” (DMS). You’ll need a scanner to convert your papers into files. Docspell can then assist in organizing the resulting mess .

  It can unify your files from scanners, emails and other sources. It is targeted for home use, i.e. families, households and also for smaller groups/companies.

  To summarize, Docspell assists you in organizing your piles of documents, resulting from scanners, e-mails and other sources with miminal effort.

  [...]

  Docspell is free software, distributed under the AGPLv3 or later.

• Medevel ☛ Organize is an open-source file management automation tool

  Organize is a unique and amazing software package that helps you organize your messy desktop, downloads, documents, and keep track of all of your important files.

  It is built with the Python programming language and runs smoothly on Windows, Linux, and macOS.

  Organize allows you to setup automated rules that works to copy and organize your files in a snap. As an example, let’s say you are taking many screenshots by day, Organize will copy and mark the screenshots in certain directly according to the rule you set.

  Organize is created by Thomas Feldmann a software engineer from Germany.

Instructionals/Technical

• Install VeraCrypt on Debian 11 – kifarunix.com

  In this guide, we are going to learn how to install VeraCrypt on Debian 11. VeraCrypt, a fork of TrueCrypt, is a free and open source on-the-fly disk encryption (OTFE) tool.

• Make Use Of ☛ Understanding Linux System Calls With the strace Command

  Every process running on your desktop uses system calls to communicate with the OS. Using strace, you can track such system calls easily.

• GNU Linux (Debian) – how to shrink-resize lvm2 luks encrypted root partition – how to enlarge SWAP space

• Linux Made Simple ☛ How to install FL Studio 20.9.2.2907 on a Chromebook

  Today we are looking at how to install FL Studio 20.9.2.2907 on a Chromebook. Please follow the video/audio guide as a tutorial where we explain the process step by step and use the commands below.

• How to install WineHQ on Ubuntu 22.04 | Mark Ai Code

  Learn how to install WineHQ on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS using the steps below. JellyFish Jammy If you’re unfamiliar with Wine, it stands for Wine Is Not an Emulator and is a tool that enables us to utilize Windows applications on Linux. Wine does not need a Windows installation on your computer to run applications written for Windows.

• AddictiveTips ☛ How to play The Long Dark on Linux

  The Long Dark is an FPS survival video game developed and published by Hinterland Studios. The game was released on Linux, Windows, MacOS, Xbox One, PS4, and Nintendo Switch. Here’s how to play it on your Linux desktop or laptop.

• AddictiveTips ☛ How to manage your Debian install with Smxi

  The Smxi script is an excellent tool for Debian users. Users can automatically install GPU drivers (and patches), install desktop environments, software, system-clean up, and more with ease.

  If you’re looking to simplify the maintenance on your Debian Linux workstation, personal computer, or home server, this app is for you. Follow this guide to learn how to manage your Debian install with Smxi.

• GNU Linux (Debian 11) – Brother HL-5450DN reliable Black and White Laser printer – that works out of the box with cups – filter those laser printers

• AddictiveTips ☛ How to play Don’t Starve Together on Linux

  Don’t Starve Together is a free multiplayer expansion to the survival game “Don’t Starve.” Players work together to survive in the game so they “don’t starve.” Here’s how to play Don’t Starve Together on your Linux PC.

• How to Add Comments to IPTables Rules

  Most distro’s have made firewalld, UFW, or some other fancy program their default firewalls. However, in my opinion IPTables/Netfilter still reigns supreme. I find it to be the best tool for the job on 90% of systems I work on. Although a firewall configuration with a lot of rules can still be difficult to read. Just like a long script, it is helpful to put comments. These comments allow others to easily identify what the rules do, especially if you are using specific source IP addresses. So in this Linux quick tip we will show you how to easily add comments to IPTables rules.

  If you are unfamiliar with IPTables, you can read “Basics of IPTables”.

• Install and Setup VeraCrypt on Rocky Linux

  In this guide, we are going to learn how to install and setup VeraCrypt on Rocky Linux. VeraCrypt, a fork of TrueCrypt, is a free and open source on-the-fly disk encryption (OTFE) tool.

• Linuxiac ☛ How to Install Google Chrome on AlmaLinux / Rocky Linux

  This tutorial will cover installing the Google Chrome web browser on AlmaLinux / Rocky Linux in a few easy-to-follow steps.

  Google Chrome is a modern web browser that is fast, simple, and safe. However, because it is not an open-source browser, it is rarely included by default on any Linux distribution and is usually not available for installation from official repositories.

  This is also true for AlmaLinux and Rocky Linux. If you have either distribution installed, you will not find the Google Chrome browser in their official repositories.

• ByteXD ☛ Linux Tail Command (With Examples) – ByteXD

  The tail command is native to Unix-like operating systems, BSD and FreeDOS. It is even now ported to Windows as a part of the unxutils package.

  In Linux, it is shipped as a part of the package GNU coreutils.

  The tail command outputs the “tail” (end) of a file or piped data.
  By default, it prints out the last ten lines of what gets passed to it. You can use other options instead of the default behavior.

  This article will explain how to use tail command, both the default behavior of tail and the options.
  Why tail in the first place? Many programs write their recent status at the end of what’s called a log file, so it is great to have a shortcut to view the end of the file instead of scrolling down a huge file.

Fedora Family / IBM

• Red Hat Official ☛ Red Hat’s The State of Enterprise Open Source report: Highlights from the government sector [Ed: Red Hat does not lead by example]

  Red Hat’s fourth annual The State of Enterprise Open Source report highlights how organizations have adapted to new ways of operating — whether due to external forces or proactive choices — and are selecting methods that provide better competitive advantage.

  The report is based on interviews of 1,296 information technology (IT) leaders from 14 countries, presenting an unbiased view of the use of enterprise open source. Respondents stated they have influence over the purchasing decisions within their organization (in app development, app infrastructure, cloud, storage, middleware, server OS or virtualization), and were not informed that Red Hat was the sponsor of the survey. Respondents also needed to be familiar with enterprise open source, and have at least 1% Linux installed at their organizations.

• Red Hat Official ☛ Red Hat Boosts Performance and Scale for Cloud-Native Application Development with Latest Portfolio Updates

• TechCrunch ☛ Red Hat open sources StackRox, the Kubernetes security platform it acquired last year

• CRN ☛ Red Hat CEO: ‘Open Hybrid Cloud Will Be Defined By Hardware Innovation At The Edge’ [Ed: Is this journalism or a commercial?]

  ‘Red Hat partners like Arm, Nvidia, Intel and more are creating technologies that are more than just smart servers at the edge. These solutions, with the right strategy and software, they can function as clouds that extend way beyond the confines of the traditional data center,’ Red Hat CEO Paul Cormier says in his Red Hat Summit keynote.

• TechTarget ☛ Red Hat CEO on IBM, VMware and hybrid cloud coopetition

  Red Hat President and CEO Paul Cormier has a unique perspective on how his company has evolved from an enterprise Linux vendor to a hybrid cloud purveyor — he’s been with the company for 21 years.

Open Hardware/Modding

• Arduino ☛ Meander Coil++ enables safe, wireless power transmission | Arduino Blog

  Modern wearable devices have allowed for a wide array of smart technologies to become mobile, including health tracking, receiving notifications, and much more. But due to their small battery size, they often run out of charge within a day or two, thus requiring frequent charging. This problem is what inspired a group of students from the University of Tokyo to create the Meander Coil++ project with the goal of enabling watt-scale wireless power transmission while also remaining safe.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

• How to block spam calls on your Android smartphone

• Hindustan Times ☛ Android tips and tricks: How to empty Trash on Android smartphone to make it run stunningly fast | How-to

• 9to5Google ☛ Visible adds eSIM support on Pixel and Samsung phones – 9to5Google

• Kim Kommando ☛ Some of the best Android 13 features to expect when you update

• The Verge ☛ Pebble founder: it’s your ‘last chance’ to make a small Android phone happen – The Verge

Programming/Development

• Daniel Stenberg ☛ case insensitive string comparisons in C

  Back in 2008, I had a revelation when it dawned on me that the POSIX function called strcasecmp() compares strings case insensitively, but locale dependent. Because of this, “file” and “FILE” is not actually a case insensitive match in Turkish but is a match in most other locales. curl would sometimes fail in mysterious ways due to this. Mysterious to the users, now we know why.

  Of course this behavior was no secret. The knowledge about this problem was widespread already then. It was just me who hadn’t realized this yet.

• Perl / Raku

  • Perl ☛ Perl Weekly Challenge 165: Line of Best Fit

  • Perl ☛ My Favorite Modules: Time::Piece | Tom Wyant [blogs.perl.org]

    Time::Piece is a date/time module that replaces the built-in functions gmtime() and localtime(). The replaced functions return a Time::Piece object, with accessors for the compontents of the time. Time::Piece also provides formatting, parsing, and arithmetic.

    This module has been in core since Perl 5.9.5. I was able to get it to pass tests as far back as 5.8.1, though not 5.8.0 or 5.6.2.

• Rust

  • Joerg Jaspert: Rust? Munin? munin-plugin…

    Sooo, some time ago I had to rewrite a munin plugin from Shell to Rust, due to the shell version going crazy after some runtime and using up a CPU all for its own. Sure, it only did that on Systems with Oracle Database installed, so that monster seems to be bad (who would have guessed?), but somehow I had to fixup this plugin and wasn’t allowed to drop that wannabe-database.

    A while later I wrote a plugin to graph Fibre Channel Host data, and then Network interface statistics, all with a one-second resolution for the graphs, to allow one to zoom in and see every spike. Not have RRD round of the interesting parts.

    As one can imagine, that turns out to be a lot of very similar code – after all, most of the difference is in the graph config statements and actual data gathering, but the rest of code is just the same.

  • The Rust Programming Language Blog: Announcing Rust 1.61.0

    The Rust team is happy to announce a new version of Rust, 1.61.0. Rust is a programming language empowering everyone to build reliable and efficient software.

  • LWN ☛ Rust 1.61.0 released [LWN.net]

    Version 1.61.0 of the Rust language has been released. Changes this time around include more flexibility in main-program exit codes, a number of new features for const functions, a number of newly stabilized APIs, and more.

Pseudo-Open Source

• Openwashing

  • Google ☛ Shared success in building a safer open source community

    Today we joined the Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF), Linux Foundation and industry leaders for a meeting to continue progressing the open source software security initiatives discussed during January’s White House Summit on Open Source Security. During this meeting, Google announced the creation of its new “Open Source Maintenance Crew” — a dedicated staff of Google engineers who will work closely with upstream maintainers on improving the security of critical open source projects. In addition to this initiative, we contributed ideas and participated in discussions on improving the security and trustworthiness of open source software.

  • Phoronix ☛ Google Makes Public Their Open-Source PSP Security Protocol

  • Announcing PSP’s cryptographic hardware offload at scale is now open source

Security

• eSecurity Planet ☛ Log4j Vulnerability Puts Enterprise Data Lakes and AI at Risk | eSecurityPlanet [Ed: Still harping about last year's news while Windows is actively hijacked, even remotely, and there are np patches]

  The Apache Log4j Log4Shell bug is one of the most critical vulnerabilities in the history of cybersecurity.

• Bleeping Computer ☛ Microsoft detects massive surge in Linux XorDDoS malware activity [Ed: Microsoft-connected sites amplifying Microsoft's own anti-Linux FUD, which distracts from the worst threats and culprits]

• CrowdStrike Cloud Security Extends to Red Hat Enterprise Linux Versions [Ed: Microsofters selling proprietary snake-oil for "Linux"]

• TechRadar ☛ Surfshark VPN for Linux gets a breakthrough new feature [Ed: Promotional VPN webspam disguised as 'article']

  Linux users in need of a proper VPN service, rejoice! Surfshark has just launched its very own Linux VPN with a full-blown graphic user interface (GUI). Now, for the first time ever, Linux users can enjoy the same level of user-friendliness, functionalities, and benefits, as VPN users on other operating systems do.

• Linux Foundation’s Site/Blog ☛ Open Source Software Security: Turning Sand into Concrete [Ed: The 'Linux' Foundation lets proprietary software companies which attack security and sometimes attack Linux... speak 'for' it]

Finance

• CNN stops bothering to hide that the economy has turned sour. – BaronHK’s Rants

  CNN was one of the last few holdouts insisting that we were in a “strong economy” with “robust growth” and “record job creation levels” and that high inflation would be “transitory” in America.

  Sometime around yesterday, they changed their minds and finally started reporting what investment magazines and CEOs were saying for months, that a dire recession is coming. (It’s already here, though.)

  I’ve said over the last few years, repeatedly, that we were in a “second tech bubble”, with the first big one of course being the Dotcom Bubble of the late 1990s and early 2000s where investors were willing to throw at and lose money on anything vaguely tech related that sounded like it might have a business plan, no matter how insane.

  But even I didn’t see what’s happening now coming. We’re in uncharted territory on gasoline prices (for the United States….Europe has always had very decadent and corrupt politicians who subscribed to this green new deal insanity, but it’s a pretty new concept here).

  There’s a shortage of baby formula, and the president of the United States refuses to do what current law authorizes him to, in order to get it under control. Because he doesn’t want to go too hard on the oligopoly that produces it all.

  [...]

  And streaming companies like Netflix are seeing record cancellations and the end to subscriber growth, and admit it will accelerate.

  Walmart has had its worst trading days since the 1980s this week, losing 19% of its share price in three days. Target and Amazon got hammered much worse.

  The whole thing is an epic disaster. And where is the news? Trying to tell people that “this millennial in their 20s just bought a $700,000 house….so why don’t you have one?”. (CNBC bullshit)

  I’m just so sick and tired and goddamned disgusted by it all. I’ve tuned out advertising completely. I don’t have any streaming disservices in my house. I watch movies and stuff on discs. Usually ones I borrowed at the library, which I have to pay taxes for whether I use it or not.

  I’ve blocked advertisements from appearing in my Web browser since 1998, when I got on the Web and found out there were ads and that they were slowing my browsing down a lot (images on a 56k modem….and now videos on my cable that I didn’t consent to watching).

  [...]

  The Democrat Party and the Republican Party that let laissez-faire Crapitalism dictate trade policy, who bankrupted us as a nation, who convinced us all we could “just go shopping” to cure what ails you, have no answers for how to fix anything, because they’re the ones who don’t really want to fix it.

  [...]

  I believe that economists will eventually call this the “app” or “smartphone” bubble, because it seems like everything involving those is shit hitting the fan, but there are lots of other bubbles too, like “cryptocurrencies”.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Re: The Disappearence of Sincere Conversations

  Trust, however, will not just appear out of the blue. Trust needs to be achieved somehow. Can algorithm suggested “friends” a la Linkedin, Xing, facebook etc. be trusted? Nope. Can members of smaller groups like the mailing list of a project be trusted? Maybe.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• Re: A Call for a Gemini Without TLS

  Occasionally there have been arguments along the lines that tranport layer security (TLS) is too complicated and should be removed from gemini (and other sites, too).

  I disagree.

  One can definitely build a gemini server, which does not deal with TLS, like vger for example. However, vger is a filter: it accepts input on stdin and produces a response on stdout. It has no notion of the network. In order to make a running vger instance accessible from the network, one must add inetd to it, and configure it to route network requests to vger and back. This works nicely as I have detailed elsewhere, thanks to Solene for this interesting approach. If you need just that, by all means, use it.

• This and That

  There is chit chat on gemini on several topics, so I’ll try to comment on the ones I find interesting. While writing it so happened that these fragments grew enough to deserve their own post. So this post just turns into shameless self advertisement, it seems.