06.17.22

GNU/Linux

• Desktop/Laptop

  • TechRepublic ☛ Dev One laptop review: System76 and HP strike the perfect balance of form and function | TechRepublic

    I never hesitate to heap praise over System76. After all, they have not only produced some of the best Linux hardware on the market, but they’re also the creators of my daily Linux distribution (Pop!_OS) as well as a proud champion of open-source technology.

    I’ve been using a Thelio as my primary desktop for several years, and I’ve been anxiously awaiting the company to produce the perfect laptop. Don’t get me wrong, the laptops they currently offer are stellar, but I’ve always been less of a fan of Linux on laptops than I have been of it on the desktop. That’s not to say there’s nothing wrong with Linux on a laptop, but there’ve been certain issues that I believe have prevented it from excelling as it should.

    The new effort by System76 and HP has changed my mind on that stance. Not only have the two powerhouses proven they can work together to create a stunning piece of hardware, but they’ve also made it quite clear the power and flexibility of Linux can be harnessed for mobile devices to brilliant effect.

• Audiocasts/Shows

  • FSFE ☛ SFP#15: All about Upcycling Android – FSFE

    In November 2021 the FSFE has launched the new campaign “Upcycling Android”. If you haven’t already upcycled your phone or you are curious to learn more about the campaign listen to our new Software Freedom Podcast episode with the campaigns manager Erik Albers.

• Applications

  • Linux Links ☛ timg – Terminal Image and Video Viewer

    
    One of our favorite adages is “A picture is worth a thousand words”. It refers to the notion that a still image can convey a complex idea. Images can portray a lot of information quickly and more efficiently than text. They capture memories, and never let you forget something you want to remember, and refresh it in your memory.

    Images are part of every day internet usage, and are particularly important for social media engagement. A good image viewer is an essential part of any operating system.

    timg is different from the vast majority of image viewers. It’s a small command-line program to view images from the terminal. Not only does it display images in a terminal, it also supports the Kitty Graphics Protocol. This allows you to view high resolution images direct in a terminal. And the software also lets you watch animations and videos within the terminal.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Tips On UNIX ☛ Install Apache NetBeans IDE 14 On Ubuntu / AlmaLinux & Fedora | Tips On UNIX

    This tutorial will be helpful for beginners to install Apache NetBeans IDE 14 on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, Linux Mint 20.3, AlmaLinux 9, Rocky Linux 8, and Fedora 36.

  • ID Root ☛ How To Install Google Chrome on Fedora 36 – idroot

    In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Google Chrome on Fedora 36. For those of you who didn’t know, Google Chrome is a cross-platform web browser that was created by the company Google. It is a fast and solid browser with a good security record. It has some unique features and is generally pretty light on system resources. Chrome was available on Linux, macOS, iOS, and Android.

    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 Google Chrome web browser on a Fedora 36.

  • Red Hat Official ☛ Podman Compose or Docker Compose: Which should you use in Podman? | Enable Sysadmin

    Both projects let you run multiple Podman containers on a single machine. But their differences might make one more appealing than the other.

  • How to install Terraform on Ubuntu 22.04 – NextGenTips

    Terraform is an open-source infrastructure as code software tool that provides a consistent CLI workflow to manage hundreds of cloud services. Terraform codifies cloud APIs into declarative configuration files.

    In this tutorial, we are going to learn how to install Terraform on Ubuntu 22.04.

    Infrastructure as code (IAC) tools allow you to manage your infrastructure with a configuration file rather than through a graphical interface. IAC allows you to build, change and manage your infrastructure in a safe, consistent, and repeatable way by defining configurations that you can version, reuse and share.

  • Citizix ☛ How to install Apache Kafka on Alma Linux 9

    Apache Kafka is a distributed event store and stream-processing platform. It is an open-source system developed by the Apache Software Foundation written in Java and Scala. The project aims to provide a unified, high-throughput, low-latency platform for handling real-time data feeds

    It is an open-source distributed event streaming platform used by thousands of companies for high-performance data pipelines, streaming analytics, data integration, and mission-critical applications.

  • Citizix ☛ How to Install and Configure Kibana on Ubuntu 22.04

    In this guide, we will learn how to install and configure Kibana on Ubuntu 22.04.

    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.

  • Linux Capable ☛ How to Install Waterfox Browser on Debian 11 Bullseye

    Waterfox is fresh air for those who want to maintain their privacy and security online. This browser has been made explicitly with 64-bit processors in mind but also runs on ARM devices like smartphones or tablets without any issues! In addition, it can be found across multiple platforms, including classic desktop systems and recent ones such as Mac OS X/ Linux interfaces, where users will enjoy its fast performance thanks to an open-source codebase that ensures stability over time.

    In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install Waterfox Browser on Debian 11 Bullseye desktop using the command line terminal with tips about maintaining and removing the browser versions.

  • Trend Oceans ☛ Display History with Date and Time in Linux

    
    The history command is one of the essential utilities for the Linux administrator, usually used to track all the shell commands you execute in a series.

    When you execute the command, the shell captures it and then stores it in the separate file of the user’s home directory at ~/.bash_history. When the history command is executed, it fetches the data from this file and displays it as an output with the command and ID on the terminal screen.

• Games

  • Fedora Magazaine ☛ Fedora Workstation’s State of Gaming – A Case Study of Far Cry 5 (2018) – Fedora Magazine

    First-person shooter video games are a great proving ground for strategies that make you finish on the top, reflexes that help you to shoot before getting shot and agility that adjusts you to whatever a situation throws at you. Add the open-ended nature brought in by large intricately-designed worlds into the mix, and it dials the player experience to eleven and, with that, it also becomes great evidence of what a platform is capable of. Needless to say, I have been a great fan of open-world first-person shooter games. And Ubisoft’s Far Cry series happens to be the one which remains closest to my heart. So I tried the (second) most recent release in the long-running series, Far Cry 5 which came out in 2018, on Fedora Workstation 35 to see how it performs.

    Just like in my previous case study, the testing hardware has an AMD RDNA2-based GPU, where the video game was configured to the highest possible graphical preset to stress the hardware into performing as much as its limiting factor. To ensure that we have a fair comparison, I set up two environments – one with Windows 10 Pro 21H2 and one with Fedora Workstation 35, both having up-to-date drivers and support software such as MSI Afterburner or MangoHUD for monitoring, Steam or Lutris for video game management and OBS Studio for footage recording. Adding to that, the benchmarks were ensured to be both representatives of a common gameplay scenario and variable enough to address resolution scaling and HD textures.

• Desktop Environments/WMs

  • Tyler Cipriani ☛ Cool Desktops Don’t Change

    Working on my old ThinkPad x220 feels easy because I’ve used the same software for over a decade.

    And while it’s tempting to switch to one of the endless new apps out there, there are good reasons to trust old tools.

  • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

    • Neowin ☛ Kdenlive 22.04.2

      Kdenlive is an acronym for KDE Non-Linear Video Editor. It works on GNU/Linux, Windows and BSD. Through the MLT framework, Kdenlive integrates many plugin effects for video and sound processing or creation. Furthermore Kdenlive brings a powerful titling tool, a DVD authoring (menus) solution, and can then be used as a complete studio for video creation.

      Kdenlive supports all of the formats supported by FFmpeg or libav (such as QuickTime, AVI, WMV, MPEG, and Flash Video, among others), and also supports 4:3 and 16:9 aspect ratios for both PAL, NTSC and various HD standards, including HDV and AVCHD. Video can also be exported to DV devices, or written to a DVD with chapters and a simple menu.

Distributions and Operating Systems

• Ubuntubuzz ☛ Download deepin 20.6 with Mirrors, Torrents, and Checksums

  Deepin 20.6 released this June. This is the latest release of the Chinese-origin computer operating system that is beautiful, unique, easy to use, as well as Free Libre and Open Source Software. In this page you can download it with alternative links and checksums added for complete experience.

• SUSE/OpenSUSE

  • Community work group update post oSC22

    The community workgroup (CWG) for the Adaptable Linux Platform (ALP) would like to update you on what has happened since the [openSUSE Conference 2022]((https://events.opensuse.org/conferences/oSC22). Make sure to check the panel discussion with the ALP steering committee and other talks from oSC22 as they become public.

    First, there is a new official communication channel! We’re using the “openSUSE ALP” matrix channel, bridged with https://discord.gg/opensuse and ircs://libera.chat/#opensuse-alp. We’ve got you covered! This is the best way how to consume updates.

    We have revisited the way we would like to communicate updates on ALP. The idea is to switch away from a digest report for all workgroups to something a bit easier to follow and more exciting to read.

    We’ve invited SUSE’s newly appointed Engineering Director Marco Varlese to the weekly ALP CWG meeting, and we have great news to share!

• Fedora Family / IBM

  • Fedora Project ☛ Fedora Community Blog: CPE Weekly Update – Week 24 2022

    Purpose of this team is to take care of day to day business regarding CentOS and Fedora Infrastructure and Fedora release engineering work.

• Canonical/Ubuntu Family

  • Android Police ☛ This guy installed Ubuntu Linux on his Google Nest Hub

    The 2nd-gen Google Nest Hub is Google’s smartest smart display yet, offering sleep tracking, passable performance, and all the Assistant intelligence you could need. For all its smarts, the Nest Hub still isn’t a full computing device, though — the OS is far too limited. While Google is hard at work building a Pixel tablet as an alternative, it will still take some time until it sees the light of day. In the meantime, an avid hacker has managed to turn the existing Nest Hub hardware into a device that actually runs Linux distribution Ubuntu, teaching Google some security lessons while at it.

    As spotted by Mishaal Rahman, San Diego-based security researcher Frédéric Basse published a report on this Nest Hub vulnerability. He details how it’s possible to exploit security loopholes in the Nest Hub’s boot process to sidestep security measures, allowing him to install a stripped-down version of Ubuntu on the device. To achieve this, he had to pry open the base of the Nest Hub, revealing a hidden USB port meant for debugging or repairs, which he connected to a USB device to boot from. A software bug in the open-source “U-Boot” bootloader allowed him to bypass secure boot, and the rest is history, as you can see in the GIF below.

  • The Register UK ☛ Ubuntu releases Core 22: Its IoT and edge distro • The Register

    Canonical’s Linux distro for edge devices and the Internet of Things, Ubuntu Core 22, is out.

    This is the fourth release of Ubuntu Core, and as you might guess from the version number, it’s based on the current Long Term Support release of Ubuntu, version 22.04.

    Ubuntu Core is quite a different product from normal Ubuntu, even the text-only Ubuntu Server. Core has no conventional package manager, just Snap, and the OS itself is built from Snap packages. Snap installations and updates are transactional: this means that either they succeed completely, or the OS automatically rolls them back, leaving no trace except an entry in a log file.

    Combined with Core’s read-only root filesystem, the idea is that the operating system is always in a known-good state, and should be able to quickly and reliably recover from a power outage or a failed package installation, without the risk of disk corruption. As such, the OS can safely update itself, and is configured to do this automatically as soon as you start it. Finally, as shipped, you can only access Core over SSH: you can’t log in on its console.

  • CNX Software ☛ Beelink SER3 & SEi8 mini PCs review – Part 2: Ubuntu 22.04

    
    Previously, I reviewed Beelink’s new SEi8 and SER3 mini PCs running Windows 11, so in this part, I will cover Ubuntu 22.04.

    The SEi8 is an actively cooled Intel mini PC that physically consists of a 124 x 113 x 41 (4.88 x 4.45 x 1.61 inches) square metal case with a plastic top and uses Intel’s 14++ nm Coffee Lake Refresh Core i3-8109U processor from 2018 which is a dual-core 4-thread 3.00 GHz mobile processor boosting to 3.60 GHz with Intel’s Iris Plus Graphics 655.

    In comparison, the SER3 is an AMD mini PC and is physically very similar, consisting of a 126 x 113 x 40mm (4.96 x 4.45 x 1.57 inches) square metal case. It is also actively cooled and uses AMD’s 14 nm Zen Ryzen 3 3200U Picasso processor from 2019 which is a dual-core 4-thread 2.6 GHz mobile processor boosting to 3.5 GHz with Radeon Vega 3 Graphics.

    Internally each has a replaceable M.2 2230 Wi-Fi 5 (or 802.11ac) Intel Wireless-AC 3165 card and an M.2 2280 NVMe PCIe Gen 3.0 SSD drive with the SEi8 review model including a 512 GB Intel 660p drive and the SER3 review model including a 500 GB Kingston drive.

• Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

  • Android Police ☛ Google rushes out Android 13 Beta 3.2 with some real bug fixes this time

  • XDA ☛ Android 13′s Nearby Unlock feature spotted in latest Google Play Services update

  • BGR ☛ Nothing Phone (1) just showed us the ugly side of Android

  • Samsung Set to Launch New “Rugged” Android Devices Soon – Phandroid

  • Computer World ☛ 12 handy hidden tricks for Google Calendar on Android | Computerworld

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• Don’t be that open-source user, don’t be me

  Before I was a maintainer of open source software I was a user of open source software, and I sometimes behaved badly.

  While using some application or library I would discover a bug or something would break my workflow with a new release and I would head to GitHub to report it. Sometimes when I got there I would find that it has already been reported, so I would comment on the issue to add anything else I thought was useful and to add weight to the report. I also occasionally returned to issues that hadn’t been resolved to see if I could add any more useful information or to ask if there was an ETA on a fix. I felt I was being helpful.

  What I didn’t consider was that my interactions were taking time/attention/resources/patience from the project. User support is a cost.

  If you take anything away from this post I hope it is that these costs need to be paid by someone, the maintainer.

• Licensing / Legal

  • Daniel Stenberg ☛ curl is REUSE compliant | daniel.haxx.se

    The REUSE project is an effort to make Open Source projects provide copyright and license information (for all files) in a machine readable way.

    When a project is fully REUSE compliant, you can easily figure out the copyright and license situation for every single file it holds.

    The easiest way to accomplish this is to make sure that all files have the correct header with the appropriate copyright info and SPDX-License-Identifier specified, but it also has ways to provide that meta data in adjacent files – for files where prepending that info isn’t sensible.

• Programming/Development

  • Qt ☛ Qt 6.4 Beta Released

    Qt 6.4 adds three modules compared to Qt 6.3 and of course brings multiple new features and improvements within the existing modules. New modules Qt 6.4 are Qt HTTP Server and Qt Quick 3D Physics, both available as a technology preview. We also restore Qt Text to Speech module, which is now updated and ported to Qt 6.4. Additionally to these, we have a new Qt VNC Server module providing remote UI functionality for Qt 6.4. The new Qt VNC Server module is available for selected commercial licenses.

    There are many important and exciting features within existing modules coming with Qt 6.4 as well – such as iOS style for Qt Quick Controls and spatial audio support for Qt Multimedia – and a lot more. One highly requested item is support for Qt for WebAssembly we have been working on via multiple technology previews in earlier Qt 6.x releases. With Qt 6.4 we are fully supporting Qt for WebAssembly as a new platform.

  • Qt ☛ What can the automotive industry can learn from video games?

    At a glance, the traditional automotive and creative video games industries seem worlds apart with very little in common. However, when you look beyond the surface, there are many similarities between where the automotive industry is right now and where the game industry was a decade ago.

  • Qt ☛ Qt Creator 8 Beta released

    We are happy to announce the release of Qt Creator 8 Beta!

  • Qt New Chief Maintainer

    The voting period for the new Chief Maintainer has ended yesterday. I’m really happy to say that we have elected a new Chief Maintainer.

    Before getting to the results, I’d like to thank both candidates for stepping up and their willingness to take over the role.

    The vote ended with 24 votes for Volker and 18 for Allan.

  • The computers are fast, but you don’t know it

    Humans have a shit sense of measurement, especially for quantities that they can’t biologically perceive. For example, you intuitively know how much more heavy a 10kg object is than a 1kg object.

    For such quantities, your sense of measurement can improve if you have some way to translate them into signals that the brain is familiar with. For example, have you seen these videos?

  • Cargo Culting Software Engineering Practices

    Three months into my first Big Tech gig I was talking to a mentor about the overhead involved with the way the organisation worked. Meetings for standups, tech huddles, refinements, retros and product reviews; Processes such as limiting work in progress, desk checks, spikes, stories, and tasks. Coming from a startup we delivered high quality software without all of that labelled process. The mentor lent me his copy of Extreme Programming by Kent Beck, and that book gave me a framework to develop my own philosophy on software delivery and engineering practices.

Leftovers

• The Register UK ☛ SpaceX staff condemn Musk’s behavior in open letter

  A group of employees at SpaceX wrote an open letter to COO and president Gwynne Shotwell denouncing owner Elon Musk’s public behavior and calling for the rocket company to “swiftly and explicitly separate itself” from his personal brand.

  The letter, which was acquired through anonymous SpaceX sources, calls Musk’s recent behavior in the public sphere a source of distraction and embarrassment. Musk’s tweets, the writers argue, are de facto company statements because “Elon is seen as the face of SpaceX.”

• Proprietary

  • Help Net Security ☛ CyberArk Endpoint Privilege Manager protects Linux systems by enforcing least privilege policies [Ed: Proprietary software can add more holes though]

  • CRN ☛ Proofpoint: ‘Potentially Dangerous’ Flaw Could Allow Ransomware Attacks On Microsoft SharePoint, OneDrive

    A Proofpoint team of researchers says their findings show ‘ransomware actors can now target organizations’ data in the cloud and launch attacks on cloud infrastructure.’

  • Dev Class ☛ Why is there a .NET dustup? Microsoft introduced closed-source C# extension for VS Code [Ed: Proprietary software is the only thing Microsoft promotes. GitHub is proprietary, VS Code is proprietary, and now this]

    Microsoft will introduce a closed-source extension for C# in Visual Studio Code as an alternative to the existing open source OmniSharp, according to a post yesterday by principal product manager Tim Heuer. This prompted a sharp retort from Miguel de Icaza, of Gnome, Mono and Xamarin fame, who declared it was “truly disappointing that Microsoft would subvert an active open source project by ramming in a proprietary extension to continue to lock down .NET.”

• Security

  • Fear, Uncertainty,
    Doubt/Fear-mongering/Dramatisation

    • Novel Panchan botnet sets sights on telecoms, education firms’ Linux servers | SC Media

      First identified in March, Panchan does not only conduct typical SSH dictionary attacks but also facilitates SSH key collection for lateral movement, with the SSH configuration and keys gathered from the host machine’s running user HOME directory, according to an Akamai Security Research report. The findings also showed Panchan’s utilization of a “godmode” communication and admin panel within its binary, as well as its ability to download cryptominers in the form of memory-mapped files in an effort to evade detection. Meanwhile, most Panchan attacks may have been targeted at the education sector because of lacking cyber hygiene and prevalent SSH key sharing across different academic institutions, said Akamai researcher Stiv Kupchik.

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • AccessNow ☛ End the impunity: police surveillance and hacking in India must be eradicated – Access Now

      Digital safety, human rights, and democracy itself, are in peril in India — the Indian parliament and the judiciary must immediately initiate independent and transparent investigations into the use of illegal hacking and surveillance.

      In 2021, it was reported that malware was used to plant “evidence” in an attempt to manipulate ongoing court cases against activists and human rights defenders. This week, a new Wired exposé revealed the latest findings from security firm SentinelOne linking the police in India to the “long-running hacking campaign, which the company has called Modified Elephant.”

      “These outrageous — and blatantly illegal — hacking and surveillance revelations by law enforcement to target activists and human rights defenders in India are an attack on the foundations of democracy,” said Raman Jit Singh Chima, Asia Pacific Policy Director and Senior International Counsel at Access Now. “This impunity that has empowered authorities to take such bold actions to threaten fundamental rights must be met with immediate investigation, accountability, and surveillance reform.”

    • CNX Software ☛ SONOFF POW Elite ESP32 WiFi power meter switch handles up to 20A load [Ed: Surveillance device spun as "smart"; connects to listening devices]

      SONOFF POW Elite is an ESP32-powered smart power meter switch that can handle up to 20A max load to monitor the power consumption of all appliances in a whole room.

• Finance

  • The Register UK ☛ Cisco pulls back on hiring with an eye on economic outlook • The Register

    Networking kingpin Cisco is hiring more cautiously to indicate that it, like many peers, is taking note of macroeconomic red flags.

    “It’s a time to be prudent,” Richard Scott Herren, Cisco senior veep and chief financial officer told the Nasdaq Investor Conference. “I think it is a time for everyone to be prudent… so we’re doing the same.”

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • IT Wire ☛ iTWire – UK approves Assange extradition to US, WikiLeaks says it will appeal

    British Home Secretary Priti Patel has approved the extradition of WikiLeaks founder and publisher Julian Assange to the US to face criminal charges there. The extradition order was issued on 20 April and sent to Patel for her approval.

    The announcement was made on Friday evening, ending a long-running saga after the Australian hacker was arrested in 2019 and jailed at the maximum security prison in Belmarsh after he had been given refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy in London for seven years.

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • Medium ☛ The Cult in Google.