12.03.22

GNU/Linux

• Make Use Of ☛ 7 Ways Using Linux Helps You in a Hard Economy

  You can expect Linux to stay with you and back you up, even when things go wrong financially.

  There are economic good times and economic bad times. When times get tough and money’s tight, it’s good to have Linux on your PC. It’s like driving an electric car as gas prices shoot through the roof. You aren’t completely unaffected, but you do have much less stress. Why, you ask?

• Linux Links ☛ Linux Around The World: USA – Oklahoma – LinuxLinks

  We cover events and user groups that are running in the US state of Oklahoma. This article forms part of our Linux Around The World series.

• Net2 ☛ What is the best operating system for you

  Partisanship and fanaticism aside, in today’s article we will talk about the pros and cons of the most common operating systems, Windows, Linux and macOS, but always guided by the need of the home user, who uses the computer to consume multimedia files, browse the internet, play games and even run some jobs, whether academic or professional. With this scope defined, corporate scenarios, infrastructure and embedded systems will be left out of this matter, as each of these, by itself, would need a separate individual story.

• Audiocasts/Shows

  • Video ☛ Cosmic Desktop, Apple bows to China, Smart Cameras spy on you: Linux – Open Source News – Invidious

  • Video ☛ KDE – Gnome Now Work “Well” On Linux M1 Mac – Invidious

    It’s incredibly impressive how far along Asahi Linux has come now it’s actually got to the point where both KDE and Gnome are usable in a completely reasonable state

  • Video ☛ Why I Considered Returning the Steam Deck! *Reaction* – Invidious

    So we are taking a look at someone who considered returning their steam deck! Well, lets see what he has to say about it!

  • Full Circle Magazine ☛ Full Circle Magazine: Full Circle Weekly News #289

    Shufflecake:

    https://research.kudelskisecurity.com/2022/11/10/introducing-shufflecake-plausible-deniability-for-multiple-hidden-filesystems-on-linux/

    Thunderbird will have a redesigned calendar:

    https://blog.thunderbird.net/2022/11/thunderbird-supernova-preview-the-new-calendar-design/

    Release EasyOS 4.5:

    https://bkhome.org/news/202211/easyos-dunfell-series-64-bit-version-45-released.html

    DuckDB 0.6.0, SQLite Option for Analytical Requests:

    https://duckdb.org/2022/11/14/announcing-duckdb-060.html

    Release of Fedora Linux 37:

    https://fedoramagazine.org/announcing-fedora-37/

    Release of EuroLinux 8.7, compatible with RHEL:

    https://en.euro-linux.com/blog/eurolinux-8-7-released/

    Canonical has published Ubuntu builds optimized for Intel’s IoT platforms:

    https://ubuntu.com/blog/canonical-announces-new-enterprise-grade-ubuntu-images-designed-for-intel-iot-platforms

    Release of BackBox Linux 8:

    https://blog.backbox.org/2022/11/15/backbox-linux-8-released/

    Release of the Rocky Linux 8.7:

    https://rockylinux.org/news/rocky-linux-8-7-ga-release/

    The openSUSE Leap Micro 5.3 distribution is available:

    https://news.opensuse.org/2022/11/17/new-leapmicro-version-now-available/

    Stable release of MariaDB 10.10:

    https://mariadb.org/mariadb-10-11-1-rc-and-10-10-2-ga-now-available/

    Release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.1:

    https://access.redhat.com/announcements/6984895

    The AlmaLinux 9.1 has been published:

    https://almalinux.org/blog/almalinux-91-now-available/

    Release of Cinnamon 5.6:

    http://cinnamon.linuxmint.com/

    Third Free RPG FreedroidRPG release candidate:

    https://www.freedroid.org/2022/11/14/switch-to-codeberg-rc3/

    Stockfish and ChessBase settle proceedings related to violation of the GPL license:

    https://stockfishchess.org/blog/2022/chessbase-stockfish-agreement/

• Kernel Space

  • LWN ☛ Three stable kernel updates [LWN.net]

    The 6.0.11, 5.15.81, and 5.10.157 stable kernel updates have been released; each contains another set of important fixes.

• Applications

  • Gajim 1.5.4 – Gajim

    Gajim 1.5.4 comes with a reworked file transfer interface, better URL detection, message selection improvements, and many fixes under the hood. Thank you for all your contributions!

    What’s New

    Gajim’s interface for sending files has been reworked, and should be much easier to use now. For each file you’re about to send, Gajim will generate a preview. This way, you can avoid sending the wrong file to somebody. Regardless of how you start a file transfer, be it drag and drop, pasting a screen shot, or simply clicking the share button, you’ll always be able to check what you’re about to send.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Vincent Bernat ☛ Broken commit diff on Cisco IOS XR

    Before committing the candidate configuration to the running configuration, you may want to check the changes that have accumulated until now. That’s where the show commit changes diff command2 comes up. Its goal is to show the difference between the running configuration (show running-configuration) and the candidate configuration (show configuration merge). How hard can it be?

  • Ubuntubuzz ☛ How To Import and Use Microsoft Word Templates on LibreOffice Writer

    This tutorial will help you enrich your LibreOffice Writer by making use of the existing, thousands of Microsoft Word’s templates on the internet. Thanks to LibreOffice compatibility features, this is possible. With this, you can quickly make academic papers, brochures, business letters, newsletters, resumes/CV and many more. Let’s try now!

  • ID Root ☛ How To Install PyCharm on Linux Mint 21 – idroot

    In this tutorial, we will show you how to install PyCharm on Linux Mint 21. For those of you who didn’t know, PyCharm is one of the most popular IDE for Python. It is developed by JetBrains. PyCharm supports many other programming languages such as HTML, CSS, Javascript, SQL, etc. The features of PyCharm can be extended using the plugins. It has built-in graphical debugger, integrated unit tester, and embedded version control system.

    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 PyCharm on Linux Mint 21 (Vanessa).

  • Linux Handbook ☛ How to Do a UDP Ping in Linux

    While ping is one of the most basic command utilities to troubleshoot networking issues, it only sends ICMP packages (belonging to the IP layer) and ports (belonging to the Transport layer) making it impossible to ping on specific ports!

    So what’s the solution? Well, I’m going to use other utilities that have the same effect as the ping command with the ability to specify ports!

• Desktop Environments/WMs

  • Xubuntu Development Update December 2022

    November was on track to be a quiet month in terms of Xubuntu development. Once daily builds became available toward the end of the month, we were finally able to start publishing some changes. With a handful of updates and the introduction of PipeWire and Flatpak, November became a much more exciting month.

  • GNOME Desktop/GTK

    • GNOME ☛ Fix mail.gnome.org for email – Ole Aamot

      mail.gnome.org seems beyond repair, after someone had the crippling idea of shutting down email mailing lists and other infrastructure on discussion.gnome.org.

      The GNOME mail.gnome.org blocking person on discussion.gnome.org was previously part of the KDE project and a known KDE community person in Berlin, who harrassed me for posting org.gnome.Radio during GUADEC 2022.

      GNOME Foundation‘s Board of Directors must step up and take back control over the GNOME project before mail.gnome.org falls apart.

Distributions and Operating Systems

• New Releases

  • 9to5Linux ☛ Lightweight Distro 4MLinux 41 Arrives with Linux Kernel 6.0, Btrfs Support, and New Apps – 9to5Linux

    4MLinux developer Zbigniew Konojacki announced today the release and general availability for download of 4MLinux 41.0 as the latest stable version of this lightweight and independent GNU/Linux distribution featuring the JWM (Joe’s Window Manager) graphical environment.

    Coming a little over four months after 4MLinux 40, the 4MLinux 41 release entered beta testing in mid-September, and now the final release is here with new features like the latest and greatest Linux 6.0 kernel series. The distro ships with Linux 6.0.9 as the default kernel and Mesa 22.1.4 as the default graphics stack.

    Highlights of this release include the ability to install 4MLinux on a Btrfs partition with Syslinux as a boot manager, new applications available out of the box, such as the FileZilla FTP client, XPaint and GNU Paint image editors, nvme command-line utility for managing NVM-Express partitions, as well as a collection of small SDL-based games, SMPlayer as the default video player app, Audacious as the default audio player app,

  • 4MLinux Blog ☛ 4MLinux Releases: 4MLinux 41.0 STABLE released.

    The status of the 4MLinux 41.0 series has been changed to STABLE. Edit your documents with LibreOffice 7.4.3 and GNOME Office (AbiWord 3.0.5, GIMP 2.10.32, Gnumeric 1.12.52), share your files using DropBox 151.4.4304, surf the Internet with Firefox 107.0 and Chromium 106.0.5249, send emails via Thunderbird 102.5.0, enjoy your music collection with Audacious 4.2, watch your favorite videos with VLC 3.0.17.3 and SMPlayer 22.2.0, play games powered by Mesa 22.1.4 and Wine 7.18. You can also setup the 4MLinux LAMP Server (Linux 6.0.9, Apache 2.4.54, MariaDB 10.6.11, PHP 5.6.40 and PHP 7.4.33). Perl 5.36.0, Python 2.7.18, Python 3.10.6, and Ruby 3.1.2 are also available.

• Fedora and Red Hat

  • Red Hat Official ☛ With the release of RHEL 9, what’s new with GNOME 40?

    Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 9 includes significant enhancements for workstation users and customers. These improvements span many aspects of the product, from performance, to application features, to the look and feel of the desktop.

    RHEL 9 Workstation includes version 40 of the GNOME desktop, and this brings some noticeable changes to the Activities Overview feature. This post describes what these changes are and how they will affect the workstation user experience, so on to learn what to expect in the new version.

  • Thessaloniki Fedora 37 Release Party aftermath | iBlog Efstathios Iosifidis

    We, at Open Source UoM, organized a Fedora 37 Release Party. These kind of events are organized around the world after the new version of Fedora is released. It is likely that it was the world’s first post-pandemic in-person Fedora 37 Release Party. There was an online Release Party, that showed us the way.

    Being an organizer once again, I felt the joy of organizing an event, meet friends and discuss about my favourite topic. The party was attended by Open Source UoM members and students of the University of Macedonia. Fortunately, every promo material I was sent, arrived on time and I gave it as a present to the party animals.

  • What’s new in Ansible Automation Platform 2.3

    We are thrilled to announce the general availability of Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform 2.3. If you didn’t get the opportunity to attend AnsibleFest 2022 in Chicago, or get time to watch the keynotes on the AnsibleFest content hub, I am the lucky Ansiblite (or is it Ansi-Bull) who will walk you through all the new, cool and exciting features coming with our new release. Ansible Automation Platform 2.3 introduces a number of new features and capabilities that deliver simpler, security-focused automation at scale. Ansible Automation Platform 2.3 is compatible with the Developer Preview of Event-Driven Ansible, a new set of capabilities that empower true end-to-end automation.

  • Red Hat Official ☛ Understanding the Confidential Containers Attestation Flow

    Attestation is a confidential computing keystone. With attestation, workload owners can fully assert the trustworthiness of the hardware and software environment their workload is running in, regardless of the security posture of the underlying infrastructure provider.

    This article describes the hardware-based attestation flows and processes that the Confidential Containers project is built upon. With hardware-based attestation, a confidential computing processor generates cryptographic evidence for a workload-running environment. Provided that the workload owner trusts that piece of hardware, they can then remotely verify that evidence and decide if the workload’s execution environment is trustworthy or not. If it is, the owner can then provision it with a set of secrets ( e.g. container image encryption keys), effectively permitting it to run the workload.

  • Red Hat Official ☛ Event-driven automation: How to build an event-driven automation architecture

    Event-driven automation is at the core of automating your emergency response, reducing reaction times to as close to real-time as possible. It’s also at the center of a Self-Healing Infrastructure, enabling consistency and efficiency in lifecycle, content and compliance management across a hybrid cloud infrastructure.

    In the first article in this series, we outlined the difference between basic automation and event-driven automation. Following up in our second article, we then defined what the common architectural components consist of, and how we can use a combination of different technologies to create a solution such as this. Now, we will take a deeper look into an example architecture that could be used in your industry, and further outline how to construct this solution within your organization.

  • Red Hat Official ☛ Red Hat Lowers Barriers to Hybrid Cloud Adoption with Expanded Public Offerings in AWS Marketplace

  • Red Hat Official ☛ Code Comments – Season 1, Episode 3: Amazon Web Services and Open Principles

    It’s one thing to talk about your open source principles. It’s another entirely to build them into your workflows. How does a large company like Amazon Web Services actually make it work? David Duncan, Sr Manager Partner Solutions Architect at AWS, explains that being open with partners and customers throughout the development process is key. He talks about ensuring there are no one-way doors, and how collaboration helps to produce a better experience for OpenShift on AWS as well as combining the power of the Cloud Control API with Ansible automation.

• Canonical/Ubuntu Family

  • Linux Mint ☛ The Linux Mint Blog: Monthly News – November 2022

    Hi everyone,

    I’ll be very brief with the news this month because we’re extremely close to BETA and we want to get everything STABLE in time for Christmas. We’re in a bit of a rush

    Linux Mint 21.1 reached QA yesterday. A bug in Launchpad is preventing us from accessing some of our translations. We’re also chasing a few bugs related to packagekit and aptdaemon but we’re hoping to have these fixed pretty fast.

    As always I want to thank all the people who donate to Linux Mint, and our sponsors. I hope you’ll enjoy the new release. Many thanks to you all.

• Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

  • The Sun ☛ Best Android app 2022 – Google reveals top pick for the year and it’s totally free | The US Sun

  • Wired ☛ End-to-End Encryption Is Coming to Android Group Chats | WIRED

  • Android Authority ☛ 5 Android apps you shouldn’t miss this week – Android Apps Weekly

  • Android Central ☛ Poll: Have you received the Android Auto Coolwalk redesign yet? | Android Central

  • Linux On Mobile ☛ LINMOB.net – Weekly GNU-like Mobile Linux Update (48/2022): Plasma Mobile Gear 22.11 and improvements to PinePhone and PinePhone Pro

    Also: Sailfish OS progress on PINE64 devices, releases of mmsd-tng and vvmplayer, a talk about Maemo Leste and a lot more.

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• SaaS/Back End/Databases

  • node-firebird driver status for Firebird Advent 2022

• GNU Projects

  • Linuxiac ☛ GIMP Stable Released for the First Time for Apple Silicon Devices

    Apple users using M1 and M2-based devices can now take advantage of the first stable version of the GIMP image editor for these architectures.

    Since version 2.8.2, GIMP has run on macOS/OSX natively. At the same time, macOS users using devices based on Apple’s new M1 and M2 architecture could also use the powerful free GIMP image editor. Still, none of the available versions had stable status.

    As expected, this resulted in several issues preventing macOS users from fully utilizing the software. Fortunately, this is no longer the case.

Leftovers

• Science

  • Extreme Tech ☛ New Cerebras Wafer-Scale ’Andromeda’ Supercomputer Has 13.5 Million Cores – ExtremeTech

    Cerebras unveiled its new AI supercomputer Andromeda at SC22. With 13.5 million cores across 16 Cerebras CS-2 systems, Andromeda boasts an exaflop of AI compute and 120 petaflops of dense compute. Its computing workhorse is Cerebras’ wafer-scale, manycore processor, WSE-2.

    Each WSE-2 wafer has three physical planes, which handle arithmetic, memory, and communications. By itself, the memory plane’s 40GB of onboard SRAM can hold an entire BERTLARGE. But the arithmetic plane also has some 850,000 independent cores and 3.4 million FPUs. Those cores have a collective 20 PB/s or so of internal bandwidth, across the communication plane’s cartesian mesh.

• Security

  • The Register UK ☛ Google says Android runs better when covered in Rust • The Register

    Google has been integrating code written in the Rust programming language into its Android operating system since 2019 and its efforts have paid off in the form of fewer vulnerabilities.

    Memory safety bugs – like out of bounds read and write or use after free – account for more than 65 percent of vulnerabilities of high or critical severity bugs in Chrome and Android, and the figures are similar in software from other vendors. These flaws degrade security and increase the cost of software development when not caught early.

    But after four years in which Android has been collecting bits of Rust, that figure has declined.

    “From 2019 to 2022 the annual number of memory safety vulnerabilities dropped from 223 down to 85,” said Android security engineer Jeffrey Vander Stoep in a blog post.

  • The Future of Open Source in the Secure Supply Chain

    When asked to reflect on March 2020, most people will recall an unsettling global environment as governments and international organizations grappled with the uncertainty of the COVID-19 pandemic. Technology leaders, however, may have a different perspective. In the midst of country-wide lockdowns, digital transformation began accelerating more quickly than ever as masses of workers were forced to establish working environments in their homes and rely on cloud-based platforms to collaborate with colleagues. As cloud demands increased, so did security risks and vulnerabilities, leading to calamitous supply chain security issues—the impact of which was felt across industries and open source communities.

Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal

  • How I Ran an RPG Con 4 Times a Year For a Decade

    I promised ~dozens to write this, so here we are 😊️

    A week or so ago I wrapped up the 40th instalment of a small Old School RPG convention I’ve run four times a year since 2012. A disclaimer here is that I didn’t actually run the first one, though I was present.

    But what do I mean when I say I’ve been running this convention? Basically I mean that I’ve done the administration and economy. How did I do it? By cheating, of course. The typical expenses for a convention is 1) rent, and 2) other stuff that I don’t really know or care about. Maybe marketing?

  • 🔤SpellBinding: GHOPUTR Wordo: FETOR

  • Jasminum

    So time wont heal nor dim, one’s fire in his heart

    So distance wont break a bond, once formed, in silence between two souls

    So all was lies we’ve been told

    And all our mistakes shall unfold. in our safest soundest dreams, our hearts

    blame us for the deed; or worse! for the lack thereof!

  • West Marches on Mondays

    Anyway, so now I’m listening to that podcast episode and of course I keep comparing our setups with theirs. The distinguish a West Marches campaign from an Open Table by saying that an Open Table could also just be a series of one-shots. And that’s true. Our games keep the same setting, of course, and so we’d also call ourselves a “West Marches” campaign, I guess.

    What’s different is that we have multiple referees. I play and run games in two multi-referee, open table, “West Marches” campaigns. Both in German.

  • A Year In Reflection

    A year ago today I broke up with my first (and so far only) girlfriend.

    I’ll try not to dwell on this since I’ve written about it a few times before, but I was not being true to myself in the relationship. I had tried to mold myself to be more compatible with her but had lost myself in the process. This was a marker for the start of a new series of my life.

    This year has been one of self-discovery and reflection. For the first 6 or so months of it I was in a fairly deep depression, lying in bed all day swiping away at dating apps to try and find someone to fill the void. However in those moments of despair, I would sometimes find boundless motivation to do things I loved. In the few weeks after the breakup I went hiking more than I ever had before, I would work on personal programming projects from the moment I woke up until late into the night, I would sit down and write for hours on end. Those speckled days of motivation would bring light to the cold loneliness I felt. Around the beginning of summer, those dark days started being replaced by more and more light in my life. Being stuck inside with covid for a week really let me relax, even though much didn’t change in my actual day-to-day routine, since I felt justified being lazy with my sickness, it let me truly decompress more than any time in recent memory. When I got better, it gave me a newly-found enthusiasm for life. I still would have dark days, but they were just that, days, not weeks on end of feeling hallow.

• Technical

  • Degoogling

    Google annoys me. Every now and then they send me e-mails with subjects

    like “1 day remaining to set up billing for Google Workspace Business

    Starter for …”. But I don’t care to set up billing. What U want to do

    is delete that account. I cannot delete it because under “Your Data &

    Privacy Options” I don’t see the “more options” link with which to remove

    the account. Last Friday I filed a complaint with the Better Business

    Bureau (known as https://bbb.org). If that doesn’t help, I’m gonna start

    a degoogling process.

  • FIVE QUESTIONS FOR DECEMBER 2022

    I was hanging out with the Internet Gopher Club Underground Syndicate
    the other day and decided to stop by the Luau Deck. christotwisty
    was there and had some questions for me

  • Reinventing How We Use Computers

    Nearly two years ago, I put into words the dream I had for a durable computer. A computer that would be built for a lifetime. A computer that would not do everything but could do 80% of what I expect from it. I called this idea the Forever Computer.

  • Announcements

    • Launching Altesq

      Hey! I’ve been currently busy with doing something that’s really important to me recently, namely Altesq.

      Altesq is a pubnix (public access unix server) running on Linux. We share the resources, while creating, chatting on IRC, perhaps speaking on Mumble, having our own shell forum via Iris, and more. The point is to bring back the intimacy of the old WWW. Altesq is not for one group or type of people, we want everyone in so we can build a tight knit community. For anyone that’s damned tired of the current state of the internet and want a breath of fresh air, this is for you. I say we should use technology to our best benefits of actually socializing and enjoying ourselves.