It's time to continue our trip down memory lane with MATE. As I've said in a previous video, I spent a lot of time on GNOME 2 when it was the default on Ubuntu, and I know most of its default apps like the back of my hand. It's been 10 years since I've used GNOME 2 though, and MATE has evolved past that, so let's see you get out of the box, and if that's any good.
Has it really been months since our last episode? Woops. We're back! Introduction the Co-op News Punch Podcast - Episode 31. Apologies on this being away from a while but it's finally here.
The podcast features myself and contributor Samsai, having a very chilled-out chat about various Linux and Linux Gaming topics across different fields.
Big promises are being made in Ruby land, Tech Crunch says Open Source is dead, and we have thoughts to share about both!
We also discuss Google's Time Crystals. They have the power to fundamentally change our lives, but what the heck are they?
1:56 Linux Innards 33:35 Vibrations from the Ether 49:15 Check This Out 59:02 Announcements & Outro
In our Innards section we talk OpenVPN, Wireguard and staying safe online
And finally, the feedback and a couple community choices
This show is a special date in open source history: the one we share with Nick Vidal, creator and alpha maintainer of Open Anniversary. Through the whole show, Nick schools Doc Searls and Shawn Powers on the important timelines of major and soon-to-be-major open source movements, the cool ways those are being recognized, discussed and celebrated—and how, in the open source way, anyone can contribute new timelines, improvements to existing ones, and ways of celebrating their anniversaries.
As part of their work around Trust Domain Extensions (TDX) support for Linux, Intel engineers are proposing a driver filter option for Linux to be able to set allow or deny lists of driver(s) that can or cannot be loaded by the booted kernel.
In order to reduce the attack surface within guest virtual machines while still wanting to be able to use the same kernel build between a host and guest, Intel engineers are looking to add this driver filter support to the kernel. When booting the guest, via the kernel command-line they can just specify the specific drivers to allow to be loaded by the kernel or alternatively setting a list of specific drivers that shouldn't be allowed to be loaded by the system.
Running eBPF kernel programs continues to be increasing popular and used for a variety of use-cases in production environments but one of the challenges is around needing to compile the (e)BPF programs for a given kernel while BPF CO-RE has been working to change that. The LLVM Clang compiler already supports the ability for BPF "Compile Once, Run Everywhere" while now Oracle engineers are working to bring the same level of support to GCC.
One of the AMD patch series that has been in the works for more than one year is the PTDMA driver providing pass-through DMA engine support on Linux. The driver is now up to its eleventh revision but the mainlining might happen soon.
The AMD PTDMA Linux driver effort dates back to September 2019 for enabling their PTDMA controller in performing high bandwidth memory-to-memory and I/O copy operations. Modern AMD CPUs support multiple PTDMA controllers, the PTDMA driver hooks into the kernel's direct memory access (DMA) subsystem and is intended to be used with AMD Non-Transparent Bridge (NTB) devices but not for general purpose peripheral DMA.
Hi list,
I'd like to announce Mesa 21.2.0 final is now available.
This has been a pretty smooth release cycle so far, and we've had very few release-blocking issues, as such We've actually released on time with no additional RCs! As usual, this is a .0 release, and those of you seeking stability over features likely want to wait 2 weeks for 21.2.1.
Cheers, Dylan
Mesa 21.2 is out as the latest quarterly update to this open-source Linux graphics driver stack for user-space, most notably providing the Intel and Radeon OpenGL/Vulkan drivers among others.
Mesa 21.2 was a very smooth cycle and has debuted without needing any extra release candidates.
Mesa 21.2 has been in development for the past three months and it brings a plethora of new features to the RADV (Radeon Vulkan) driver in the form of several Vulkan extensions to improve support for Vulkan apps/games, as well as OpenGL ES 3.1 support on GT21x hardware and the Panfrost driver, wideLines support on lavapipe, a new Asahi driver for Apple’s M1 chip, and DRM format modifiers on Zink.
The bottom image is crocus vs 965 on top. This only happened on Gen4->5, so Ironlake and GM45 were my test machines. I burned a lot of time trying to work this out. I trimmed the traces down, dumped a stupendous amount of batchbuffers, turned off UBO push constants, dump all the index and vertex buffers, tried some RGBx changes, but nothing was rushing to hit me, except that the vertex shaders produced were different.
However they were different for many reasons, due to the optimization pipelines the mesa state tracker runs vs the 965 driver. Inputs and UBO loads were in different places so there was a lot of noise in the shaders.
I ported the trace to a piglit GL application so I could easier hack on the shaders and GL, with that I trimmed it down even further (even if I did burn some time on a misplace */+ typo).
Using the ported app, I removed all uniform buffer loads and then split the vertex shader in half (it was quite large, but had two chunks). I finally then could spot the difference in the NIR shaders.
The X.Org Server has picked up a new "-fakescreenfps" option to help with VNC and other remote display scenarios.
Currently when any main hardware screen is powered off, the X.Org Server initializes the fake screen to a one second update interval. The X.Org Server will keep to that one second update interval for fake screens even if VNC or other remote viewing software is running, until the physical display is powered on.
Next time you want to identify a song you hear in a TV show, movie, or other video give Mousai a go.
Mousai by SeaDve is a song recognition app for Linux desktop (and named after the ancient Greek Goddess of song and music). Built in GTK and leveraging the AudD song recognition API, Mousai is basically Shazam for Linux.
Open Mousai, hit the ‘listen’ button, play the song you want to identify (ideally in vague proximity to your laptop’s microphone) wait a few seconds, and bam: it tells you the song name and who performs it.
As we rapidly transition to an increasingly digital society, data protection is a greater concern than ever before. Encryption is one of the most effective and widely used methods of securing senstive information from unauthorized parties. In this article, we'll introduce you to eight open-source file and disk encrytion tools we love to help you safeguard critical data and protect your privacy online.
Today we are going to look at how to install the Opera Browser on Linux Lite 5.4. As seen in the video, a person downloads Opera, from the official site, and then installs it with the built-in installer. Enjoy!
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Play Framework on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Play Framework is a framework that allows us to make web applications with Java and Scala in a fast and easy way. These applications are based on scalability and the possibility that they can be adapted to many different needs.
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 Play Framework on Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal Fossa). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 18.04, 16.04, and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint.
Sudo also called “superuser do” is a command in Linux that allows you to run high-privilege admin commands as a root user. It asked to enter your personal password and confirms your requests by checking a sudoers file.
After a fresh Debian 10 installation, you could not execute the privileges tasks by running the sudo command. You will get the error ‘sudo command not found in Debian 10ââ¬Â². The reason for this error is the sudo command isn’t included in Debian 10 by default.
In this post, we will show you how to fix sudo command not found in Debian 10 VPS.
Want to know the tricks of replacing a variable in a file using the SED command?
This article will give you an overview of replacing a variable value in a file using SED. Before replacing a variable in a file using SED, you need to understand what SED is, the syntax of SED, and how SED works.
I’ll also show how to perform delete operations using SED. This will come after the variable value replacement part. If you’re looking for that, you can directly jump onto that, and skip the rest.
So, let’s begin the guide.
Cross-platform file sharing has never been easy. Of course, you have services like AirDrop, Nearby Share, and Quick Share, but they only work within their ecosystems.
As a result, if you want to transfer files from Linux to an Android/iOS device or vice-versa, you need a cross-platform file sharing service. Even though you do have a few different options in this regard, Snapdrop is the most effective file-sharing service of the lot.
Recently, my Chromebook Pixel 2015 found itself no longer supported. I really loved that Chromebook. The two of us wrote several novels together and the keyboard/screen was unmatched. To this day I've yet to experience a better keyboard/trackpad combo. But, as they say, all things must end. So, when I received the notification that my Chromebook Pixel would no longer be receiving updates, I felt a tinge of sadness. Sure, I had a Pixelbook as a backup device, but it just wasn't the same. It had a nice keyboard, but it was nowhere near that of the Pixel. And the screen? There was zero comparison.
I had a choice: Continue using the Pixel, even though it would no longer be receiving upgrades, or do something about it.
UDP-based log collection is so last century. We had TCP-based log collection for decades and TLS encryption to secure connections. Still, UDP is in wide use, especially at large companies and industrial automation, where every change is slow. In most cases, UDP logging is used by networking devices, but sometimes it is just left there from ancient times and people are reluctant to change it. In either case, at higher message rates it can lead to performance problems and thus to message loss.
Originally, the udp() source of syslog-ng was single-threaded. That does not scale well with typical multi-core CPUs with slower cores. There are many tricks to enhance UDP performance in syslog-ng. Combining those with the udp-balancer() source of syslog-ng PE gives the most reliable solution.
Docker is a software platform for building applications based on containers—small and lightweight execution environments that make shared use of the operating system kernel but otherwise run in isolation from one another. While containers have been used in Linux and Unix systems for some time, Docker, an open source project launched in 2013, helped popularize the technology by making it easier than ever for developers to package their software to “build once and run anywhere.”
Digital data loggers have come a long way over the years. Data loggers are small digital devices that are used to record, store, and sometimes transmit large amounts of data that is gathered through sensors. Like many other kinds of technology, the design and construction of digital data loggers has been altered and improved over the years.
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It should come as no surprise that this simple piece of technology has come such a long way in the last 100-plus years. When the first chart recorder for environmental monitoring was patented, the first transcontinental phone call was also placed. Now, we have high-tech computers in our pockets that we call phones; data loggers have made the same technological leaps.
The move from chart recorders to data loggers was a massive step forward, but those early devices are a far cry from what today’s digital data loggers are capable of doing. Above are listed just a handful of the benefits the latest data loggers provide. Depending on your organization, data loggers may well have even more specific advantages.
The main point is, if your organization is not using the latest version of this great technology, it is missing out. There is no excuse in 2021 for not at least considering what a modern digital data logger can do for you and how it can affect your manufacturing, storage and transportation processes, your compliance with regulations and standards and, ultimately, your bottom line.
One of the great attributes of SVG is that its text nature lends itself to be easily version controlled. Inkscape uses SVG as its native format (and extends it using its private namespace).
Unfortunately it uses the documents themselves to store things like canvas position and zoom state. This instantly erases one of the benefits for easy version control as every change instantly turns into unsolvable conflict.
Luckily you can at least give up the ability to store the canvas position for the greater good of not having merge conflicts, if you manage to convince your peers to change its defaults. Which is what this blog post is about :)
To move a file on a computer with a graphical interface, you open the folder where the file is currently located, and then open another window to the folder you want to move the file into. Finally, you drag and drop the file from one to the other.
To move a file in a terminal, you use the mv command to move a file from one location to another.
OpenVPN creates an encrypted tunnel between two points, preventing a third party from accessing your network traffic. By setting up your virtual private network (VPN) server, you become your own VPN provider. Many popular VPN services already use OpenVPN, so why tie your connection to a specific provider when you can have complete control?
The first article in this series demonstrated how to set up and configure a Linux PC to serve as your OpenVPN server. It also discussed how to configure your router so that you can reach your VPN server from an outside network.
This second article demonstrates how to install the OpenVPN server software using steps customized from the OpenVPN wiki.
While we're busy working on both the upcoming Godot 4.0 and 3.4 releases (with a dev snapshot for 3.4 beta 2 available now), we still cherry-pick important bug fixes to the 3.3 branch regularly for maintenance releases (see our release policy).
Godot 3.3.2 was released in May, and a number of useful fixes have been queued in the 3.3 branch since then, so now's a good time to push them in production.
As there is no new feature and only bug fixes, this RC 1 should be as stable as 3.3.2-stable and can be used in production if you need one of the fixes it includes.
Love your roguelikes? Humble have a nice little package waiting for you to pick up with the Humble Remarkable Roguelikes Bundle that's now live.
Following on from the rather good Humble Choice for August, and the also quite good Humble RPG Heroes Bundle they're back again. It certainly seems like Humble have recently started putting out some better game bundles.
Steam hardware surveys always make for fun reading, especially in recent times seeing how many of those scalped graphics cards actually made it into gaming PCs. But right now there's a more interesting milestone to look at. Thanks to the folks at GamingonLinux who keep a close watch on such things, Linux use on Steam has spiked in recent weeks.
It now accounts for 1% of all Steam users, or, doing rough maths based on 120 million people earlier this year, about 1.2 million Steam players are on Linux. This still absolutely pales in comparison with Windows, as you would expect. But of the 0.11% increase in share Linux has seen recently, 0.08% of that came from Windows, with the rest coming from Mac.
Most of KDE's servers are hosted in Hetzner in Germany. We also have a storage box there where we store backups for most servers (including those outside Hetzner).
When the OVH datacenter fire happened, everyone who managed servers but didn't use OVH still got worried about their own data and backups. Including the KDE Sysadmin team; we wondered if KDE's data would be protected if a similar disaster happened at Hetzner.
We can know in which specific datacenter a server is, and even choose the DC when ordering a new server. However, it turns out we can't know or choose the datacenter for storage boxes. I asked Hetzner support and they said they don't give that information, and "that may even change" (I guess they reserve the right to transfer the storage to another DC according to internal needs).
Last time we left on the general API design. Since then I’ve been refactoring the existing animation-related code so we can reuse it for our public API. Part of that refactoring has been converting the current boxed-type adwaita animation code into a gobject class. I’ve learned a lot of how GObject works under the hood by doing so, so I expect to be a lot quicker implementing the next milestones.
[...]
I quickly prototyped a demo page for said timed animations (which is highly WIP, from design to phrasing):
In our previous article, we informed you we removed the Indian mirror Ghead due to technical issues. Unfortunately, we still haven’t received any updates on the progress of the issues and we will inform you as soon as we received any news from the mirror admin. For our Indian community, we recommend using the Freedif mirror located in Vietnam as the nearest server or the Tuna mirror in China.
The Dutch mirror admin for Easylee announced that the content moved to a new server, also located in The Netherlands with a whopping 10Gbit connection, widening the reach of this server. The server also is an Arch mirror and is called https://mirror.erickochen.nl, so those who want to rank it on top can use it also for the mainstream Arch updates. If your system is up-to-date and you have run eos-pacdiff, the mirror has already replaced the Easylee mirror in etc/pacman.d/endeavouros-mirrorlist .
If you’d looked in that script, you also noticed we gained another German mirror https://mirror.moson.org, thanks to our community member @moson. Thank you for offering us space on your server and improving our user experience with that.
New revision of the rolling. Real final 1.x release. Revision of the NETINST ISO.
Codename: Rolling
This release is in fact a "1.7.1". There are no changes to the distribution except for some updates and additions and updates to the default profile.
When updating the tasksel tool which allows here to integrate the selection of tools as well as the deactivation of services directly in the installer, the configurator was removed and "broke" some things offered by the old configurator (launched post-installation).
The disabling of services as well as the complete installation of guests and the activation of VirtualBox at startup if installed, can no longer be done via the tools provided for Kaisen unless you update the ISO, which is done here.
This is the only reason and the only change since 1.7.
My name is Julia, I was born in Bremen. This beautiful old Hanseatic city is situated in the north of Germany, close to the North Sea.
When I was six years old, my parents and I moved to Rosenheim in Bavaria, which is on the southern end of Germany. Rosenheim is a rather small city, close to the Alps. I consider this my first “experience abroad”, as Bavarian people are very different to the Northern German people. They have a very strong accent and a special dialect.
It took me years to understand the Bavarian dialect, and I still can’t talk like them. And still, I am learning new Bavarian words I have never heard before.
Imagine you're a programmer with a problem: Your code is linked to a library that you're unfamiliar with. The code should work, but it doesn't. It almost works, but something is wrong inside the library. Another program works correctly with the same part of the same library. So, now what? It's probably a silly problem, but how will you locate it?
In a scenario like this one, you could be in for some serious source code gazing, documentation digestion, and mailing list archaeology. If that fails, it's time to reach out to human experts and hope for the best. Or, you could try to save time with a clever tool. I was recently hit with several code traps like this one. Fortunately, I'm familiar with SystemTap.
You can use Kubernetes Operators to set up automatic resource management for services in your applications. In a previous article, I described this pattern and how to create an operator in the Go language. In this article, we will continue to explore the pattern, this time by creating a Kubernetes Operator in Go to keep a WordPress site up to date. I recommend reading or reviewing the earlier article before starting this one.
Cockpit is the modern Linux admin interface. We release regularly.
Here are the release notes from Cockpit 250 and cockpit-machines 249:
In July, we published 12 posts. The site had 2,979 visits from 1,931 unique viewers
Podman is a daemonless container engine for developing, managing, and running OCI containers on your Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) system. In this post, I will create a photo gallery running in a Podman container on a RHEL Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instance, where the photos displayed by the website are stored on the EC2 instances connected to AWS Elastic File System (EFS) across multiple Availability Zones (AZs).
Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) provides a serverless, set-and-forget elastic file system that can be used with AWS cloud services and on-premise resources. It’s built to scale on demand to petabytes without disrupting applications. Amazon EFS helps eliminate the need to provision and manage capacity to accommodate growth.
July 2021 was a record-breaking month for Enable Sysadmin. We published 25 articles and received over 660,000 page views from over 450,000 unique visitors. Today, we are looking back at our top 10 articles to give readers a chance to catch up on any of the great content they might have missed. In this list, you will see various topics covered, and we are confident that some, if not all, will be of interest to you.
By at least one measure, people are returning – or planning to return – to the traditional office in 2021. A Deloitte survey of 275 executives conducted in April found that more than two-thirds of respondents (67 percent) were still fully remote at the time. But 64 percent expected their organization to return to the office at some point in 2021, and another 25 percent said they’d already reopened.
In spite of some high-flying predictions – and high-profile company announcements – about long-term shifts to working from home, just two percent of the executives in the Deloitte survey said their organizations would remain permanently remote.
COVID-19 has fundamentally changed how we work – and how we think about work – today and well into the future. As a result, it has prompted a reboot of how organizations recruit and onboard new employees.
The struggles of the past year have also prompted many workers to rethink their career priorities, quitting their jobs in extraordinary numbers – with a record 4 million people doing so in April alone, according to the U.S. Labor Department. This has ushered in an era some pundits are calling “The Great Resignation,” creating a higher-than-usual demand for workers. And this has many employers – especially those in high-demand technology settings – scrambling to find adequate talent to fill the many job openings.
CIOs in particular are struggling to accelerate digital transformation and ensure the latest technologies are available, a requirement for attracting tech-savvy workers – and of course, the customers they are striving to please.
IBM CEO Arvind Krishna has been named the No. 1 Most Influential Executive on CRN’s 2021 Top 100 Executives list.
It takes a lot of work to put on our annual contributor conference. Special thanks this year to Amazon AWS for their platinum sponsorship! We really appreciate their generosity, as well as the support and resources for Fedora Cloud, Fedora CoreOS, and more.
Cinelerra is one of the most advanced, open-source non-linear video editors and compositors for Linux. Turn your Linux box into a complete audio and video production environment.
There have been many attempts to create tablets running Linux, and even a few ones with ARM processors, like the Pine64 PineTab. However, another company is now giving it a shot, with an ARM Linux tablet that looks remarkably like an Apple iPad. It’s called the ‘JingPad,’ and at least on the surface, it seems like it could be a great device for anyone interested in Linux on a tablet.
The JingPad is currently available for pre-order at Indiegogo, but don’t let its status as a crowdfunding project scare you away — the manufacturer has already sent out pre-production units to a few tech reviewers and news outlets. Early videos show off the tablet working as advertised, though there are a few software issues still being worked out.
Congatec announced “Conga-HPC/cTLH” (COM-HPC Client B) and “Conga-TS570” (Basic Type 6) modules with up to octa-core Tiger Lake-H CPUs. The Conga-HPC/cTLH offers up to 128GB DDR4, optional NVMe, 20x PCIe Gen4, 2x 2.5GbE, 2x USB 4.0, and 8K support.
Minisforum TL50 is a mini PC based on Intel Core i5-1135G7 Tiger Lake quad-core/octa-thread processor that ships with 12GB RAM, and optional 256GB and 512GB SSD preloaded with Windows 10 Pro.
The mini PC also features two 2.5 Gbps Gigabit Ethernet ports, two 2.5-inch SATA drives, one M.2 slot for NVMe SSD, and supports 8K and 4K monitor setups through HDMI, DisplayPort, and USB-C video outputs. It was announced a few months ago, but it’s now available for sale for $699.99 and more on Banggood depending on storage options.
Almost every maker has run into the problem of not being able to find a convenient display or power source for their project prototype, and thus leading to minor delays and some frustration. However, YouTuber Another Maker has come up with an open source desk concept that makes finding these things simple. The system he built uses a large grid of swappable panels that can simply slide into place within a wooden frame. Behind these are a few devices for both power and connectivity, such as power strips, an Ethernet switch (with PoE capabilities), and an HDMI switch for changing between a Raspberry Pi and a PC.
As time goes on nothing changes with Mozilla, Firefox continues to slowly die and at this point I really don't know what can actually be done to address. I would not be surprised if come 5 years from new Mozilla barely remains to exist.
At Mozilla we believe that greater transparency into the online advertising ecosystem can empower individuals, safeguard advertisers’ interests, and address systemic harms. Lawmakers around the world are stepping up to help realize that vision, and in this post we’re weighing in with some preliminary reflections on a newly-proposed ad transparency bill in the United States Congress: the Social Media DATA Act.
Earlier this summer, we started a series of blog posts analyzing the technical merits of the various privacy-preserving advertising proposals out there. Our goal is to advance the debate and help break down this complex topic. In this new addition to this series, we look at the SWAN.community and United ID 2.0 proposals. We have conducted a detailed analysis and this post provides a summary.
Recently the Surgeon General of the United States weighed in on the spread of disinformation on major platforms and its effects on people and society. He echoed the calls of researchers, activists and organizations, like Mozilla, for the major platforms to release more data, and to provide access to researchers in order to analyze the spread and impact of misinformation.
Yet Facebook has again taken steps to shut down this exact kind of research on its platform, a troubling pattern we have witnessed from Facebook including sidelining their own Crowdtangle and killing a suite of tools from Propublica and Mozilla in 2019.
Most recently, Facebook has terminated the accounts of New York University researchers that built Ad Observer, an extension dedicated to bringing greater transparency to political advertising that was critical for researchers and journalists during the presidential election.
The Document Foundation (TDF) is the charitable entity behind the world’s leading free/libre open source (FLOSS) office suite LibreOffice.
We are looking for an individual or company to implement support for editing and creation of Dynamic Diagrams.
The work has to be developed on LibreOffice master, so that it will be released in the next major version.
The task is to solve the following problem: Our existing “SmartArt” import uses the fallback stream in OOX files (and has some issues). It therefore gives us only the draw shapes that are imported, so we lose the original layout. Additionally, in older file versions we don’t have the cached shapes, and therefore can’t render anything.
The solution we seek, and as such the scope of this tender, is to have a schema driven diagram layout as a core feature. This should be interoperable with OOX (at least MSO2016) and have suitable extensions for ODF. It should layout interoperability, and allow editing of the underlying data, and selection of a schema.
Recently, we covered the JetBrains Developer Ecosystem survey. According to the survey, around 47% of developers said they use Linux, whereas over 61% voted for Windows. Here we are with another survey, but this time by Stack Overflow, over 80,000 developers were asked the same question.
For starters, Stack Overflow is one of the largest developer portals where people, irrespective of their experience, can ask programming-related questions or even answer others’ questions. In this year’s survey, developers were asked a variety of questions, but in this article, we’re going to have a brief look at the current state of Linux among the developers.
Christoph and I are please to share that a new release 1.1.57-1 of x13binary, of the X-13ARIMA-SEATS program by the US Census Bureau (with updated upstream release 1.1.57) is now on CRAN.
The x13binary package takes the pain out of installing X-13ARIMA-SEATS by making it a fully resolved CRAN dependency. For example, when installing the excellent seasonal package by Christoph, then X-13ARIMA-SEATS will get pulled in via the x13binary package and things just work. Just depend on x13binary and on all major OSs supported by R you should have an X-13ARIMA-SEATS binary installed which will be called seamlessly by the higher-level packages such as seasonal or gunsales. With this the full power of the what is likely the world’s most sophisticated deseasonalization and forecasting package is now at your fingertips and the R prompt, just like any other of the 17960+ CRAN packages. You can read more about this (and the seasonal package) in the Journal of Statistical Software paper by Christoph and myself.
This release brings a new upstream release as well as binaries. We continue to support two Linux flavours (theh standard x86_64 as well as armv7l), windows and for a first time two macOS flavour. In addition to the existing Intel binary we now have a native built using the arm64 “M1” chip (with thanks to Kirill for the assist).
This week the lang team held its August planning meeting. We normally hold these meetings on the first Wednesday of every month.
We had a short meeting this month, just planning and scheduling the design meetings for the remainder of the month.
After each meeting, we post an update (like this one!) with notes and meeting announcements.
Almost thirty years ago, some forward looking people interested in metal work and Northern Sámi, decided to create a list of words used in Northern Sámi metal work. After almost ten years this resulted in a dictionary database, published as the book "Mekanihkkársánit : Mekanikerord = Mekaanisen alan sanasto = Mechanic's words" in 1999. The story of this work is available from the pen of Svein Lund, one of the leading actors behind this effort. They even got the dictionary approved by the Sámi Parliament of Norway as the recommended metal work words to use.
Fast forward twenty years, I came across this work when I recently became interested in metal work, and started watching educational and funny videos on the topic, like the ones from mrpete222 and This Old Tony. But they all talk English, but I wanted to know what the tools and techniques they used were called in Norwegian. Trying to track down a good dictionary from English to Norwegian, after much searching, I came across the database of words created almost thirty years ago, with translations into English, Norwegian, Northern Sámi, Swedish and Finnish. This gave me a lot of the Norwegian phrases I had been looking for. To make it easier for the next person trying to track down a good Norwegian dictionary for the metal worker, and because I knew the person behind the database from my Skolelinux / Debian Edu days, I decided to ask if the database could be released to the public without any usage limitations, in other words as a Creative Commons licensed data set. And happily, after consulting with the Sámi Parliament of Norway, the database is now available with the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license from my gitlab repository.
We are pleased to announce that the Android Microconference has been accepted into the 2021 Linux Plumbers Conference. The past Android microconferences have been centered around the idea that it was primarily a synchronization point between the Android kernel team and the rest of the community to inform them on what they have been doing. With the help of last year’s focus on the Generic Kernel Image[1] (GKI), this year’s Android microconference will instead be an opportunity to foster a higher level of collaboration between the Android and Linux kernel communities. Discussions will be centered on the goal of ensuring that both the Android and Linux development moves in a lockstep fashion going forward.
The Linux Foundation is ecstatic to return to in-person events next month; we know how important these face-to-face gatherings are to accelerating collaboration and innovation in the open source community.
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As announced previously, in-person attendees will be required to be fully vaccinated against the COVID-19 virus. A vaccine verification app will be used to confirm vaccination status.
The FluBot strain of Android banking malware, which was initially observed in Spain in late 2020 before spreading more widely across Europe over the following months, is now targeting Australian banks.
Once installed, FluBot periodically sends a list of apps installed on the device to one of its command-and-control servers. The server responds with a list of apps the malware should overlay. Upon one of these apps being launched, FluBot immediately displays an overlay on top of the legitimate app. The overlays impersonate the legitimate apps and are designed to collect the victim’s online banking credentials, which are sent to the criminals operating FluBot via the command-and-control server.
Another month has passed, and we’ve gotten a lot of work done. No big announcements to make, but lots of incremental progress, bikeshedding and meetings. We have been laying the ground work for several initiatives in Alpine 3.15, as well as working with other groups to find a path forward on vulnerability information sharing.
