We recently cracked the case of how to get Vulkan graphics acceleration working in Crostini. I’ve got a full guide on how to do this yourself coming up as my next article so stay tuned for that if you’d like to be able to tinker with this a bit yourself! With the power of Vulkan, we wanted to see how well this all performs inside and outside of a the virtualized Crostini environment. Spoiler alert: the first results aren’t great.
Let me first start with a disclaimer. There’s a reason Vulkan isn’t enabled for the masses: it’s not ready yet. We’re seeing a large performance drop comparing a game running in and outside of Crostini. This new graphics pass-through driver, code-named Venus, was only merged upstream a few months ago and is truly revolutionary. There could be lots of patches behind closed doors at Google that we don’t know about. We only have what is publicly available to us.
Linux is a powerful platform, one that Enterprise businesses of all kinds have grown to depend on. In fact, without Linux, most businesses would struggle to remain as agile and capable as they are. That’s significant, given how competitive the corporate landscape has become. If your business isn’t able to pivot in an instant, you’ll fall behind quickly.
That means your IT staff needs not only have the skills required to deploy and manage the Linux operating system, they also need to understand some of the more important best practices that can help keep those systems running smoothly and securely.
This PDF download from TechRepublic Premium takes a look at some of the best practices you should be applying to all of your Linux deployments, broken down into easily managed categories.
Achieving RPO/RTO Objectives with ZFS pt 1, FreeBSD Foundation Q2 report, OpenBSD full Tor setup, MyBee - bhyve as private cloud, FreeBSD home fileserver expansion, OpenBSD on Framework Laptop, portable GELI, and more.
Crunchbang++ 11 was recently released, and it's awesome! So, why aren't more people aware of this really good Linux distro? Crunchbang++ is lightweight, fun to use, and well designed. In this video, I install the latest version and check it out.
A Quick overview of Zorin OS 16 core https://youtu.be/SqAISUFTYLg Zorin OS is an Ubuntu-based Linux distribution designed especially for newcomers to Linux. It has a Windows-like graphical user interface and many programs similar to those found in Windows. Zorin OS also comes with an application that lets users run many Windows programs. The distribution's ultimate goal is to provide a Linux alternative to Windows and let Windows users enjoy all the features of Linux without complications.
This week we’ve been fixing 3ââ¬Â³ disk drives and reading magazines. We round up the news from the Ubuntu community and discuss our favourite picks from the wider tech news.
It’s Season 14 Episode 25 of the Ubuntu Podcast! Alan Pope, Mark Johnson and Martin Wimpress are connected and speaking to your brain.
The first 1,000 people to use this link will get a 1 month free trial of Skillshare: https://skl.sh/infinitelygalactic08211 I've had an epiphany. It's impossible for desktop Linux users to get the 'perfect OS' because each Linux distro has different priorities to balance. So, here's my 12 pillars of an operating system and why we can't have nice things. What order would you put these 12 pillars in? Is there a pillar missing?
I'm announcing the release of the 5.13.13 kernel.
All users of the 5.13 kernel series must upgrade.
The updated 5.13.y git tree can be found at: git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git linux-5.13.y and can be browsed at the normal kernel.org git web browser: https://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-s...
Still not on the desktop but not even Steve Ballmer saw this day coming
On August 25, 1991, Linus Torvalds, then a student at the University of Helsinki in Finland, sent a message to the comp.os.minix newsgroup soliciting feature suggestions for a free Unix-like operating system he was developing as a hobby.
Linux has turned 30 years old, and the Linux kernel now runs at the heart of more than three billion active Android devices, making it the most-used operating system in the world.
In this article, Thomas Claburn talks with Greg Kroah-Hartman, the Linux Foundation fellow who oversees stable Linux kernel releases and has worked on the kernel for more than 20 years, to learn about what's happened and where Linux is going.
Google promoted Chrome 94 to beta status today with some exciting changes.
First up, Chrome 94 Beta marks the completion of the WebCodecs API under its origin trial and thus now officially available. WebCodecs is the low-level codec API around audio/video encoding and decoding along with raw video frame handling and more. WebCodecs API handling is intended to be more efficient than JavaScript or WebAssembly codec implementations.
Google Chrome OS engineers are working on making Linux's VirtIO-GPU driver more extensible. The VirtIO-GPU driver has been modeled around the Virgl protocol for handling 3D within guest virtual machines but with a new context type addition they aim to support additional protocols.
With the proposed "context type" addition to VirtIO-GPU, multiple different protocols could be supported for allowing GPU communication between the guest VM and the host. Virgl could still be supported alongside other protocols like GFXSTREAM rendering commands for OpenGL or Vulkan and more rather than artificially limiting VirtIO-GPU to the Virgl use-case.
Across testing these three LLVM Clang releases to look at the resulting performance of the generated binaries, the CFLAGS/CXXFLAGS were maintained as "-O3 -march=native" throughout. The test server was the Intel Xeon Platinum 8380 2P with 512GB of RAM running on an Intel 7.68TB D7-P5510 SSD using Ubuntu 21.04 with the Linux 5.14 kernel. The only change being made across testing was moving the compiler used for building the open-source C/C++ benchmarks from Clang 11.0.1 to Clang 12.0 to Clang 13.0 Git using the apt.llvm.org binaries.
LLVM 13 brings AMD Zen 3 tuning, the GFX1013 target being added to the AMDGPU back-end for RDNA2 APUs, guaranteed tail calls are now supported via statement attributes for C and C++, many improvements to clang-format, the build system now allows building multiple distributions, support for ARMv9-A's Realm Management Extension (RME), the Hexagon target now supports the V68/HVX ISA, C API improvements, and a variety of other enhancements.
Right from the start we see LLVM Clang 13 continuing to show improved performance over its predecessors.
These days with LLVM Clang being effectively at pairty to GCC on AArch64 and x86_64, the performance difference between releases tend to be less so than in the past, but there still being made here and there.
There are some exceptions like with the libraw image decoder library seeing some nice improvements with Clang 13.0 on this Ice Lake Linux server.
OpenShot video editor released v2.6.0 with new computer vision, AI and audio effects. The official PPA has been updated with Ubuntu 21.10 support.
After more than one year of development, the free open-source video editor released its “finest” version.
OpenShot Video Editor 2.6.0 comes with the all necessary tools a user needs to create exclusive videos for online sharing channels like YouTube.
OpenShot is a free video editing software for Linux, macOS, and Windows. It is a very easy to use video editor that surprises its users with the power it has. Key features include video effects, audio waveforms, title editing, 3D animations, multi-lingual and desktop integration.
The interface is quite simple and offers everything you need in a video editing app. The user can switch easily between the Advanced and Simple views depending upon the information which is needed to be seen at any time on the screen by anyone. Apart from this, the users can customize this interface to suit their needs.
OpenShot 2.6 brings the most requested features such as AI based object tracking and more. We recap the release in this post.
exatorrent is a new cross-platform self-hostable BitTorrent client written in Go. It's made with servers / seedboxes in mind, but you can also run it locally.
Even though it just had its 0.0.1 release, the free and open source application is already quite feature-rich, having a responsive web client (written in Svelte and Typescript) as well as WebSocket API support (so you can write your own client for it), multiple ways of adding torrents (magnet, infohash or torrent file), speed limiter, multi-user authentication, and even the ability to stream audio / video torrents directly in the web browser, or via VLC or mpv.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Deepin on Manjaro 21. For those of you who didn’t know, Deepin Desktop environments is a beautiful graphical user interface developed by Deepuin Linux developers. DDE comprises the Desktop Environment, Deepin Window Manager, Control Center, Launcher, and Dock. It is lightly configurable. A 64-bit installation of Manjaro running Deepin uses about 525MB of memory.
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 through the step-by-step installation of the Deepin Desktop Environment on a Manjaro 21 (Ornara).
Pale Moon is a fork of Mozilla Firefox. It is open-source and exists as a response to the further slide into proprietary habits. As a result, it is not as modern as Firefox but respects your freedom as a Linux user much more. This guide will show you how to install and use the app on your Linux system.
If you wish to watch Netflix on your Linux desktop, you won’t be able to download the official Netflix app like in Windows. Instead, you’ll need to use Electronplayer. It is an advanced application that supports most modern streaming services. Here’s how to set it up on your system.
Note: to successfully follow this guide, you will need to have a Netflix account. This is because Netflix will not function within Electronplayer without an account. To find more information on how to create a new account, please head over to the Netflix website.
Are you looking to watch Hulu on your Linux PC from the comfort of your Linux desktop? Tired of opening up Firefox or Chrome to watch your shows? Check out Electronplayer. It’s a streaming app for Linux that supports most mainstream streaming services, including Hulu. Here’s how to set it up on your system.
Note: to successfully follow this guide; you will need to have a Hulu account, as well as a paid subscription for the service. Hulu will not function within Electronplayer without an account. Find more information about Hulu here.
Shutter is a complex screenshot application for the Linux desktop. With it, users can take screenshots of selections on the screen and the entire desktop. Shutter also has a built-in image editor for touching up screenshots. Here’s how to use it on your Linux system.
When you deploy websites and services, you almost always depend on SSL certificates to add a layer of assurance to those who connect to those deployments. For anything in production, you'll be purchasing your SSL certificates from a certificate authority, otherwise, you're not really giving those users much assurance.
However, for testing purposes, there's no reason to purchase those certificates from an authority (at least not until you're ready to move to production). For those instances, I like to generate locally signed certificates.
There are a few tools available for Linux to create self-signed certificates, one of which is mkcert.
An ISO file is a soft copy of the DVD or CD content, instead of a hard copy. Manufacturers use ISO files to save on shipping and hidden charges incurred in delivering CDs and DVDs.
On Linux-based machines, mounting ISO images might seem complex to beginners. Since Linux is a terminal-focused operating system, mounting and unmounting ISO files require special tools and commands.
You can mount and unmount ISO images on Linux using both command line and graphical methods. Here are the steps for mounting ISO images on Linux.
ClamAV for Linux is a free and open-source virus scanner that is operated via the command line. Here we will see the process of installing ClamAV (Clam AntiVirus) on Rocky Linux 8 or AlmaLinux 8.
ClamAV anti-virus engine scanner clamd (ClamAV daemon) service can be started in the background to receive calls (for virus scanning) from other programs. This antivirus mainly uses as a server-side virus scanner on mail servers. ClamAV offers a Command-line scanner, a Milter interface for Sendmail, an Advanced database updater, and built-in support for archive formats, ELF executables + Portable Executable files, and popular document formats. Hence, it is using for various purposes such as email scanning, web scanning, and endpoint security.
Apache Solr is an open-source search platform written on Java.Solr provides full-text search, spell suggestions, custom document ordering and ranking, Snippet generation, and highlighting. Solr handles a variety of data types out of the box, including JSON, XML, many Office documents, CSV, and more.
Solr is designed for scalability and fault tolerance. alsoused for enterprise search and analytics use cases and has an active development community and regular releases.
Also Solr is the popular, blazing-fast, open source enterprise search platform built on Apache Luceneââ¢.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install MongoDB Compass on Debian 11. For those of you who didn’t know, MongoDB Compass is a graphical tool for MongoDB. It visually allows you to explore your data, run the queries, and interact with the database with full CRUD functionality. It also has a query performance monitoring system so that you can check and optimize queries and this GUI is available on Linux, Mac, or Windows.
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 through the step-by-step installation of the MongoDB Compass on a Debian 11 (Bullseye).
The sudo is one of the most popular command-line programs used in Linux systems. It gives you the privilege to perform server administration as a non-root user. To use the sudo command, first, you have to know how to create a sudo user in Linux. After adding a sudo user, you will have access to all the commands associated with sudo.
Depending upon the operating system of the user, the procedure of installing sudo and adding a new user account with sudo access is slightly different. Most of the popular distros of Linux are going to be covered in this post. Stay tuned.
Installing Debian could be easy or complicated depending upon the ISO you choose.
If you go with the default ISO provided by the Debian website, you’ll have a hard time installing Debian. You’ll be stuck at a screen that asks for network drivers to be installed from external removable media.
For those using Debian 11, you might have noticed that installing Nginx directly from Debian’s repository does not install the latest stable or mainline version. In fact, it is quite far behind where Nginx is stable, and Mainline is at the current time of its development.
For most, using the default Nginx that comes bundled with Debian will be preferred, but for those wanting to use newer versions for the newest features, the following tutorial will cover the steps needed to do this.
Ntopng is a web-based application for true network traffic flow monitoring that is available as open freeware. It’s an improved kind of innovative Ntop that displays network use, statistics, and analytical data. It works with a variety of computer systems, including Windows, Linux, Mac OS, and BSD. Ntopng comes in professional and corporate editions with license restrictions, as well as a free open source community version. In this guide, I will show you how to install and configure the Ntopng community edition on Ubuntu 20.04.
The end of 2021 is near, which means the EOL (end of life) of CentOS 8 is near too. So there are no more updates and support for the CentOS 8 Linux, and it's huge disadvantages for everyone who using CentOS as the main operating system in the development and production environment. On contrary, there is a new Linux distro replacement for CentOS 8, one of them is called "Rocky Linux".
In case you are CentOS 8 user and want to migrate to Rocky Linux, you don't need to rebuild and reinstall your server/server. Because the Rocky Linux project provides a handy migration tool for anyone who wants to migrate from CentOS 8 to Rocky Linux. This tool is a life-saver for anyone who wants to migrate their development or production environment to Rocky Linux. In this guide, you will learn how to migrate from CentOS 8 to Rocky Linux 8.4 using the migration tool provided by the Rocky Linux project.
Developers no longer just build applications, but also play essential roles for infrastructure operations in DevOps and infrastructure as code (IaC) areas. In those situations, you may also be responsible for the operation of test infrastructure that runs on a managed service such as Red Hat OpenShift on IBM Cloud. Ensuring its security and regulatory compliance is also important and you may want to automate such work. That automation can be facilitated by an OpenShift Operator called Compliance Operator, which is a compliance status check engine for OpenShift clusters.
Most of the time when you run a script, you're concerned with its immediate results. Sometimes, though, the task is complex or needs to execute at a particular time, and there are many ways to achieve that goal.
Most modern Linux distro uses systemd as init replacement. It is a suite of basic building blocks for Linux distros such as RHEL/CentOS & co, OpenSUSE/SUSE, Fedora, Arch, Debian, Ubuntu, and more. By default, most distro boot into GUI, but you can change to text or vice versa.
The older version of the Linux distros came with SysV init or Upstart. Such init provided a set of runlevels for text, muli user, and GUI system. However, systemd uses the concept of targets instead of runlevels. This page explains procedures to implement runlevel like config when working with systemd targets. In other words, you will learn how to switch between text or GUI mode using systemd instead of init levels on modern Linux distros.
Run container virtual machine by installing Docker CE on Debian 10 or 11 Bullseye Linux using the guide given here in this article…
Debian 11 is the latest long-term supported release from the developers of this Linux. However, if you are using it and don’t want to install any Virtual machine software such as Virtual Box, then Docker will be the best and lightweight platform to quickly create containers using various Linux OS and other App images.
Java is a free, open-source, multipurpose, and high-level object-oriented programming language. Generally, it is used for creating web, mobile, and cloud applications. You can create games, chatbots, and other applications using the Java language. Java JDK is a collection of several tools including, JRE, Java, Javac, and Jar. There are two variants of JDK, OpenJDK and Oracle JDK.
OpenJDK is a completely open-source Java with a GNU General Public License while Oracle JDK requires a commercial license under the Oracle Binary Code License Agreement.
In this post, we will show you how to install OpenJDK 16 and Oracle JDK 16 on Rocky Linux 8.
Explore the Node.js reference architecture's best practices for building good containers and ensuring faster development cycles and better deployments.
Deadcore is a platformer FPS that blends both exploration and speedrunning. The game was developed by 5 Bit Games and published by BANDAI NAMCO Entertainment. Here’s how to play Deadcore on Linux.
Henchman Story is an upcoming satirical visual novel that takes aim at the world of superheroes. The developer has announced it's releasing on October 14 and there's a huge demo upgrade. Another game coming thanks to a successful Kickstarter campaign, where Silken Sail Entertainment managed to pull in over $18K back in October 2020.
Ready for more hardcore roguelike action? Ultimate ADOM - Caverns of Chaos has now left the Early Access dungeon, along with a big content update adding in a new playable class. 25 years or so after the original ADOM by some of the same team, this is a proper roguelike.
The big new update added in a Necromancer Class, 68 new skills, 19 new spells, 20 new monsters, the faction system was expanded, you can customize your character and a whole lot more. Seems like a pretty good update overall to the game - hopefully it might now appease some classic ADOM fans.
Kathy Rain: Director's Cut is the revamp of the popular 2016 adventure game. Rebuilt with the Unity game engine along with native Linux support. This new demo isn't up for long though, as you have until later tomorrow to download and try it out (although plenty of demos work outside of Steam if you back them up…).
Set in the 90's, Kathy Rain: Director's Cut is a reimaging of the original story from 2016. Kathy is a strong-willed journalism major who must come to terms with her troubled past as she investigates the mysterious death of her recently departed grandfather.
For those of you using Linux and the cloud gaming service Stadia, Destiny 2 got a huge boost recently as Bungie finally implemented cross-play.
Sadly, Destiny 2 doesn't yet work on the Linux desktop directly through Steam Play Proton, and they've just recently added in BattlEye which makes it even more difficult to get working. Thankfully, Stadia is an option that works quite well on Linux in a Chromium browser. One issue though is that the Stadia player-base isn't exactly all that big so finding people to play with could have been an issue.
Running an island doesn't need to be boring and now you can have a wild party in Tropico 6 as Kalypso Media today released the Tropico 6 – Festival DLC.
Probably the most creative additional content release yet it tasks you with planning and managing celebrations, while also dealing with "The Boredom". Tropico 6 – Festival also adds a unique party planning mechanic to Tropico 6, allowing players to host 20+ types of festival. Four distinctive, themed areas will be included for players to throw spectacular shindigs, as well as new buildings such as the Dance School, Balloon and Fireworks factory to get the party started. Players will also be able to enjoy a host of new musical additions, alongside a snazzy party outfit (and paint job) for El Prez and the presidential palace.
Finally we're getting the update we've all been waiting on as Hearth & Home is releasing on September 16 for Valheim.
This is the update Iron Gate has been teasing in short videos recently that will overhaul combat with new food options and new mechanics for blocking, staggering and stamina to give players more freedom in character builds. They haven't revealed everything coming yet but we do know there will be a bunch of new options to build too. Iron Gate is also expanding with three more developers to work on programming, animating and QA.
We are happy to announce the release of Qt Creator 5.0 !
The Qt Company has formally released Qt Creator 5.0 today as their latest version of this Qt/C++ minded integrated development environment.
With today's Qt Creator 5.0 release they have shifted to semantic versioning moving forward. Most exciting with Qt Creator 5.0 is that it's offering experimental use of Clangd as the back-end for Qt Creator's C/C++ code model. Clangd will ultimately be used for its code model rather than their existing libclang-based solution. Clangd can be used for providing code completion and other features with the Language Server Protocol.
The KDE Community has been developing a variety of Free Software products using Qt for 25 years now. Among them, the Plasma Desktop Environment, creativity tools like Krita and Kdenlive, educational applications like GCompris, groupware suites like Kontact and countless other applications, utilities, and widgets.
Qt is famous for its rich set of high-quality, cross-platform APIs. However, it does not cover every single use case. Indeed, that would be impossible. So, to fill in the gaps, over time, KDE has created code that has been incorporated into many KDE projects. To foster reusing these battle-tested solutions outside KDE projects, we share this code in the form of modular libraries.
I’ve spent some time on Pango, recently. Here is a little update on the feature work that I’ve done there. All of these changes will appear in Pango 1.50 and GTK 4.6.
Line spacing has historically been a bit painful in GtkTextView. You can set distances before and after paragraphs, and between wrapped lines inside a paragraph. But this does not take font sizes into account—it is a fixed number of pixels.
A while ago, I added a line-spacing factor to Pango, which was meant to help with the font size dependency. You basically tell Pango: I want the baselines of this paragraph spaced apart 1.33 times as wide as they would normally be. The remaining problem is that Pango handles text one paragraph at a time. So as far as it is concerned, there is not previous baseline above the first line in a paragraph, and it does not increase the spacing between paragraphs.
There are several apps built for GNOME. Most of the stock (default) GNOME apps do not get enough spotlight as a separate mention.
While Flathub as a platform helps highlight some fantastic applications for GNOME, it limits to Flatpak apps only.
Also, it is not just dedicated to GNOME, of course.
Hence, there is a new website to focus more on the GNOME ecosystem and highlight the best GNOME apps.
The GNOME project has launched "Apps For GNOME" at apps.gnome.org for highlighting the ecosystem of available GNOME applications.
There is Flathub and such for highlighting many of the user visible GNOME applications but limited to those that are available in Flatpak form but also not exclusively limited to GNOME apps. There hasn't been a comprehensive, modern, user-friendly web-site for outlining all of the GNOME apps and inviting participation until now with this Apps for GNOME.
Our Apps for GNOME website is now available at apps.gnome.org! It features the best applications in the GNOME ecosystem. Let’s quickly get into the most exciting aspects of Apps for GNOME.
For whatever reason, the alpine-glibc project is apparently being used in production. Worse yet, some are led to believe that Alpine officially supports or at least approves of its usage. For the reasons I am about to outline, we don’t. I have also proposed an update to Alpine which will block the installation of the glibc packages produced by the alpine-glibc project, and have referred acceptance of that update to the TSC to determine if we actually want to put our foot down or not. I have additionally suggested that the TSC may wish to have the Alpine Council reach out to the alpine-glibc project to find a solution which appropriately communicates that the project is not supported in any way by Alpine. It should be hopefully clear that there is no such thing as a “glibc based alpine image” because Alpine does not use glibc, it uses musl.
You can now try the CuteFish desktop environment on top of an Ubuntu base, with CuteFish OS Ubuntu.
A installable image of the distro is available to download for testing and development purposes. While it can’t be recommended for daily driver status (the desktop environment is under active development) it is nonetheless a great way to sample the promising, Qt-based CuteFish desktop environment.
The current .iso is based off of Kubuntu 21.04, but uses the Qt-based CuteFish desktop by default rather the more familiar KDE Plasma.
A small selection of KDE software come preinstalled, such text editor Kate, screenshot tool Spectacle, and Muon Package Manager, as well as well-known apps like Firefox, VLC, and MPV.
Also included are some native CuteFish apps, including a file manager, calculator, terminal, and settings hub. All of these are very functional, though the file manager is (understandably) rather no-frills at present, compared to something like Dolphin or Index.
We are proud to Announce the initial release of our Android Build of Makulu Linux Named “Makulu Droid”. This is an early build, but stable build. Makulu droid lets you run Android apps directly from your Linux Desktop much the same way you would on a Native android operating system, You can Grab your copy from the main menu above or by Clicking HERE Please make sure to read the release notes properly before downloading.
Issue #1079: Clear out the local repository of retrieved package files to fix the “… InRelease’ changed its ‘Suite’ value from ‘stable’ to ‘oldstable’” message.
After initial work on the wifi renewal branch went quite fast and smooth, things have slowed down a bit in the last few months.
Most of the slow down was due to me not being available for this type of work for unexpectedly long times - a problem that should be fixed now.
Started back in 2018 was an effort by the NetBSD project to update their operating system WiFi drivers by re-syncing more code from FreeBSD and making various improvements. Three years later the work has yet to be merged but after stalling for some time is back to being worked on by interested developers.
The WiFi renewal effort by NetBSD has been working to support newer WiFi standards, provide better SMP support, and handling other wireless networking features. The WiFi renewal effort was restarted last year though developer Martin Husemann noted the progress has slowed down a bit in recent months.
The latest 20210824 snapshot updated Mozilla Thunderbird from version 78.13.0 to version 91.0.1, which is the next Extended Support Release codebase. The new email client offers many new features like keyboard shortcuts to access To/CC/BCC fields and a PDF JavaScript viewer is now included in Thunderbird. Two major version updates were in the snapshot; an update to nftables 1.0.0 now recognizes the command-line option --define. GTK based volume control tool pavucontrol 5.0 has support for switching Bluetooth codecs that comes new in PulseAudio 15.0, which was released in the 20210823 snapshot 24-hours earlier. GNU Compiler Collection was updated to version 11.2 and fixed the One-time Passwords In Everything package with glibc 2.34. A few GNOME and RubyGems packages were updated in the snapshot. Command-line utility grep updated to version 3.7, which skipped the stack overflow tests in the qemu build. The runtime nodejs16 16.6.2 update fixed the improper handling of untypical characters in domain names and fixed three Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures.
The network-detector, packet-sniffer, and intrusion-detection package Kismet updated to its latest 2021.08 version in snapshot 20210823; the packages made some small improvements and has a new Wireless Intrusion Detection System alert. PulseAudio 15.0 dropped several BlueTooth patches and improved hardware support. PDF rendering package poppler 21.08.0 added an Application Programming Interfaces to allow the addition and modification of outlines into a PDF. An updated 1.9.7 version of sudo enabled OpenSSL support for a secure central session recording collection. And yast2-bootloader 4.4.6 replaced mkinitrd with dracut.
RPMs of PHP version 8.0.10 are available in remi-php80 repository for Fedora 32-34 and Enterprise Linux (RHEL, CentOS).
RPMs of PHP version 7.4.23 are available in remi repository for Fedora 32-34 and remi-php74 repository Enterprise Linux (RHEL, CentOS).
RPMs of PHP version 7.3.30 are available in remi-php73 repository for Enterprise Linux (RHEL, CentOS).
Setting up your Python 3.9 development environment in a Linux container is quick and easy. This article shows you how to install Python 3.9, set up your environment, and use it to create and run a Python web service on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 8. The whole process should take about 15 minutes.
The amazing thing about building and using a Linux container with Python is that you don't actually need Python on your machine to do it. Creating a Python containerized application on a machine without Python support might not be ideal, but it is possible.
Customers often tell me that they need to stay on a specific RHEL minor release in order to maintain a supported configuration for a third-party application, such as SAP for example. It’s also typically true for large, business-critical applications that don’t tolerate frequent downtime for updates.
This article explains the mechanisms available in Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) to help make this possible.
Stability and the ability to upgrade with minimal downtime are two important features of production environments, and using the Leapp upgrade utility on Red Hat Satellite 6, can provide both. In this post, I'll show you step by step how to upgrade smoothly from Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 7 to RHEL 8 with pre-upgrade checks available with Leapp upgrade.
The Leapp upgrade is a mechanism that enables us to migrate from RHEL 7 to RHEL 8. The Leapp upgrade can be performed on individual client systems, but you can upgrade multiple systems in parallel if Red Hat Satellite is a part of your infrastructure.
“It is near impossible to name an industry that isn’t implementing AI solutions nowadays given its breadth of applications,” says Jim Radzicki, CTO of Telus International. “But, with so many options, the most difficult part can be deciding where to invest first.” There are so many areas where AI can be applied and demand for intelligent capabilities in the enterprise continues to grow, says Peter A. High, author of Getting to Nimble: How to Transform your Company into a Digital Leader and president of the technology and business advisory firm Metis Strategy.
AI project prioritization is critical. “It ensures that AI is connected to the business’ agenda and priorities,” says Goutham Belliappa, vice president of AI engineering at Capgemini North America. “Through tight governance and monitoring, companies can identify which projects are performing better than others and adjust the prioritization and resources accordingly in an agile manner.”
Healthy debate, contrarian points of view, and passion on all sides of an issue can lead teams to the best possible decisions and outcomes. It’s up to leaders to find the balance between conflict and harmony - and help each member of the team build their healthy conflict skills.
We had an opportunity to ask CIOs who recently won the 2021 National CIO of the Year ORBIE Awards about the role conflict plays on their teams. This is the first year that InspireCIO has brought past ORBIE winners from chapters across the United States together to present National awards, recognizing CIOs for their excellence in technology leadership.
Read on for advice from these award-winning CIOs on how to encourage the right kind of conflict on your team.
This morning I posted about doing a rebuild in OpenEmbedded:
https://bkhome.org/news/202108/openembedded-dunfell-updated-rebuild.html
...the build is happening in a USB3 HDD and is still going. There is a progress indicator stating 92% complete.
I mentioned that some packages have version bumps. For anyone who is interested, I am compiling 807 packages in OE, here they are:
For the previous post, I had a list of 807 packages and wanted to process them into neat columns. EasyOS has the 'column' utility, but I couldn't make it do what I want, so wrote a little script to convert the package names into a html table. For the record this is it...
In March 2018, there was a Bug Squashing Party in Tirana, Albania (photos).
A group of students from Kosovo had written to Lamb and asked for funds to travel to Tirana. The cost for each person was €8 for a hostel and €15 for the bus. These amounts seem trivial for many of us in free software but they are more than a day's income for students in a developing country.
Lamb authorised each of their requests in writing (example below).
Many NGOs fund events in the Balkan countries and it is typical for organizations to pay the bills on the day of the event. Some of the students did not have this much money in cash. These are developing countries and organizations have to be sensitive about this when operating there.
There was only one Debian Developer present at the event. Everybody turned to him and one of the local organizers on Sunday morning and asked for help. To resolve it quickly, the Debian Developer went to the hotel, asked the students to give him copies of each receipt and authorisation email from Chris Lamb and then paid all the bills in cash. The total was approximately €431
The Ubuntu team is pleased to announce the release of Ubuntu 20.04.3 LTS (Long-Term Support) for its Desktop, Server, and Cloud products, as well as other flavours of Ubuntu with long-term support.
Like previous LTS series, 20.04.3 includes hardware enablement stacks for use on newer hardware. This support is offered on all architectures.
Ubuntu Server defaults to installing the GA kernel; however you may select the HWE kernel from the installer bootloader.
As usual, this point release includes many updates, and updated installation media has been provided so that fewer updates will need to be downloaded after installation. These include security updates and corrections for other high-impact bugs, with a focus on maintaining stability and compatibility with Ubuntu 20.04 LTS.
The Ubuntu Team announced the release of Ubuntu 20.04.3 LTS today for its Desktop, Server, and Cloud products, as well as official flavors.
Ubuntu 20.04.3 includes hardware enablement stack for use on newer hardware. It’s Linux Kernel 5.11 provided via ‘linux-generic-hwe-20.04‘ package. If you have install the package previously, you should have been running on the Kernel for a period of time.
Besides that, the release includes mainly bug-fixes, installation media, security and stability updates, according to the announcement...
Thanks to all the hard work from our contributors, we are pleased to announce that Lubuntu 20.04.3 LTS has been released!
What is Lubuntu?
Lubuntu is an official Ubuntu flavor which uses the Lightweight Qt Desktop Environment (LXQt). The project’s goal is to provide a lightweight yet functional Linux distribution based on a rock-solid Ubuntu base. Lubuntu provides a simple but modern and powerful graphical user interface, and comes with a wide variety of applications so you can browse, email, chat, play, and be productive.
Spanish hardware company Bq (also known as Bq Readers) found moderate successful selling a range of Android phones and tablets in Europe.
But it gained more attention when it repurposed several of its handsets in 2015 to run Ubuntu Touch, later launching a pair of ‘convergent’ tablets too.
The first Bq Ubuntu Phones got a lukewarm reception. Artificial scarcity made the handsets difficult to buy, and the comparatively high cost for lower-end specs dampened enthusiasm. Sales were also (considerably) lower-than-expected, which (one assumes) fed into Bq’s decision to back out, and Canonical’s decision to axe the Ubuntu Phone project entirely in 2017.
Home monitoring is a big part of home automation, but it’s often overshadowed. Our attention tends to get hijacked by cool projects that perform physical actions. Whether it’s turning the lights on, changing their color, running a robot vacuum cleaner, pulling on the blinds or watering the garden. All these actions are very cool and very visible. Which makes it easy to ignore the background tasks that are the backbone of great home automation.
YouTuber and robotics maker RootSaid has been giving this a lot of thought. He’s put together an excellent tutorial on creating a self contained, real-time home monitoring module. It’s built around the excellent Nano RP2040 Connect, and sends everything to Arduino Cloud.
Designed by Thailand-based Saijai Tech, MiniLink IIoT Node is an Arduino compatible board based on either an ESP32 WiFi & Bluetooth SoC or an unnamed Microchip Cortex-M0+ microcontroller designed for Smart Agriculture or industrial applications (e.g. PLC controllers).
The board includes an RS485 interface for sensors or actuators, an ACER-branded LoRa module, and expansion headers to add an extra wireless module with either LoRa PtP (P2P, Point-to-Point), NB-IoT, or 3G/4G LTE & GNSS, and some of those add an extra RS485 port.
Aaeon’s “FWS-2280” network appliance supplies Intel’s Elkhart Lake with up to 32GB DDR4, 4x GbE, SFP, SATA, and mSATA plus 2x mini-PCIe and optional M.2 for simultaneous wireless connections.
Aaeon announced the first network appliance we have seen equipped with Intel’s 10nm fabricated, up to quad-core Elkhart Lake (Atom x6000E, etc.) processors. The FWS-2280 follows earlier Aaeon desktop net appliances including the FWS-2365, FWS-2360, and FWS-7360, all of which run on the up to 16-core Atom C3000 (“Denverton”) platform.
SolidRun’s 58 x 48mm “LX2162A SOM” runs Linux on NXP’s new 16-core, Cortex-A72 based LX2162A and offers 12x SerDes lanes for up to 4x 25GbE or up to 8x PCIe Gen3. A “ClearFog LX2162A” dev kit is also on the way.
SolidRun has posted a product page for a compute module built around NXP’s new 16nm fabricated, 23 x 23mm Layerscape LX2162A networking SoC, which is a quarter the size of the similarly 16-core Cortex-A72 based LS2160A. The new LX2162A SOM is in turn a quarter of the size of SolidRun’s earlier, LS2160A-based CEx7 LX2160A COM Express Type 7 module, which powers its HoneyComb LX2K Mini-ITX board. The upcoming ClearFog LX2162A dev kit for the LX2162A SOM is half the size of Mini-ITX (see farther below).
The company behind the Linux-based Sailfish OS for mobile devices has been plugging away for ten years, and now it’s finally turned a profit.
Jolla was founded by a group of former Nokia employees who wanted to continue developing the Linux-based MeeGo operating system for smartphones even after Nokia shifted its focus to Windows phones (and eventually sold its smartphone business to Microsoft). A decade later, TechCrunch reports Jolla has reached a “turning point” and become profitable: revenues were 53% higher in 2020 than they were in 2019.
From the abacus to written ledgers to adding machines and calculators, people have been using accounting tools for centuries.
Most businesses start off by relying on spreadsheets to manage the books, and many continue to use spreadsheets, even as the business grows and becomes more complex.
The result is disparate data spread across multiple spreadsheets that are often out of date or present conflicting numbers.
An open leader must strike a balance between tight and loose organizational culture, especially when approaching different problems or contexts. For example, consider how a company in different stages of its maturity responds to external threats. A start-up company has very different threat concerns than established companies with long histories. On the other hand, start-ups have few established procedures and can be freer in their operations. As time passes, depending on the company growth and the competitive environment, the looseness-tightness balance and adapting to the situation may be required to shift.
So open leaders can ask themselves: What is your company's relative level of tightness or looseness? Is its level balanced to be most effective? How could it be pushed in one direct or the other to reduce liabilities and increase assets of both looseness and tightness. Leaders can ask these same questions of their divisions, departments, immediate teams, or even temporary project teams. This is where the open organization principle of adaptability becomes important.
Open source software (OSS) powers the most widely used tools in machine learning. Their status as free tools for anyone to use means they can—and should—play a more significant role in policy conversations about AI. Now, a new report from the Brookings Institution argues that if the US wants to play a lead role in global AI development, open source must be more than a policy footnote.
In a new analysis, Brookings Fellow Alex Engler cites several benefits that OSS brings to AI development. In particular, it gives data scientists with less experience implementing algorithms the chance to work faster by making complex math problems easier to use.
This isn’t a mere case of more regulation: Engler argues that policymakers should use OSS to their benefit and offer funding in the process. Most AI funding comes from corporations, which can create conflicts of interest and perceptions of bias. By using and investing in community-led tools, policymakers can expand open source software’s reach and use it to help craft more thoughtful policies.
Whatever kind of writing you do—technical documentation, corporate communications, Harry Potter-vampire crossover fan fiction—it likely happens online. Here are some great browser extensions that will benefit anyone who writes on the web. Get grammar help, productivity tools, and other strong writing aids…
I needed a meter to tell me what the air quality is like outside. Now I know!
If you need one as well, or if you are looking for an accessible gauge for anything else, here you go.
The internet has ingrained itself into every aspect of our lives, but there’s one aspect of the digital world that I bet you take for granted. Did you ever notice that many links, specifically hyperlinks, are blue? When a co-worker casually asked me why links are blue, I was stumped. As a user experience designer who has created websites since 2001, I’ve always made my links blue. I have advocated for the specific shade of blue, and for the consistent application of blue, yes, but I’ve never stopped and wondered, why are links blue? It was just a fact of life. Grass is green and hyperlinks are blue. Culturally, we associate links with the color blue so much that in 2016, when Google changed its links to black, it created quite a disruption.
Jean H. Weber and Kees Kriek from the LibreOffice Documentation Team are happy to announce the immediate availability of the Writer Guide 7.2, one week after the release of LibreOffice Community 7.2
LibreOffice 7.2 Community includes many changes not visible in the user interface. These changes include improved interoperability with Microsoft’s proprietary file formats and performance improvements in handling large files, opening certain .docx and .xlsx files, managing font caching, and opening presentations and drawings that contain large images.
One week ago, we announced LibreOffice 7.2, our brand new major release. It’s packed with new features, and has many improvements to compatibility and performance too. So, what has happened in the week since then? Let’s check out some stats…
GitLab has announced the release of its latest iteration, 14.2, which improves CI speed, delivers built-in CI support for Apple devices, and gives dev teams easier and tighter integration with GitPod.
Academics have put GitHub's Copilot to the test on the security front, and said they found that roughly 40 per cent of the time, code generated by the programming assistant is, at best, buggy, and at worst, potentially vulnerable to attack.
Copilot arrived with several caveats, such as its tendency to generate incorrect code, its proclivity for exposing secrets, and its problems judging software licenses. But the AI programming helper, based on OpenAI's Codex neural network, also has another shortcoming: just like humans, it may produce flimsy code.
Python is the "de facto platform for new technologies," according to research by the IEEE in its Spectrum publication.
The new survey places Python, Java, C, and C++ as the top four programming languages. JavaScript, which typically tops such surveys, is in fifth place.
By contrast, StackOverflow reported earlier this month that JavaScript was the most used language by some margin, with 65 per cent followed by Python at 48.2 per cent and Java at 35.35 per cent. Redmonk analysts also placed JavaScript top, as does developer tools company JetBrains in its State of the Developer Ecosystem survey.
Sometimes it is easier to implement prototypes in user space using high-level languages, such as Python or Java. In this document we attempt to describe our implementation effort related to Host Identity Protocol version 2. In the first part, we describe various security solutions, then we discuss some implementation details of the HIP protocol, and finally, in the last part of this work we discuss the performance of the HIP and IPSec protocols implemented using Python language.
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Internet was designed initially so that the Internet Protocol (IP) address is playing dual role: it is the locator, so that the routers can find the recipient of a message, and it is an identifier, so that the upper layer protocols (such as TCP and UDP) can make bindings (for example, transport layer sockets use IP addresses and ports to make a connections). This becomes a problem when a networked device roams from one network to another, and so the IP address changes, leading to failures in upper layer connections. The other problem is establishment of the authenticated channel between the communicating parties. In practice, when making connections, long term identities of the parties are not verified. Of course, there are solutions such as SSL which can readily solve the problem at hand. However, SSL is suitable only for TCP connections and most of the time practical use cases include only secure web surfing and establishment of VPN tunnels. Host Identity Protocol on the other hand is more flexible: it allows peers to create authenticated secure channels on the network layer, and so all upper layer protocols can benefit from such channels.
Every Linux distribution derives its roots from the Linux kernel, which was released way back in 1991. It was initially written in C, but slowly and steadily, Rust is taking over as a second language to C within the kernel. As the technology continues to evolve, so have the commands you can use to perform the same functions, but at better efficiency.
While these commands broadly do the job, there is always a touch of modern coding standards worth adding, to make things more seamless. Let's talk about some of the Rust tools in Linux that are worth trying.
My Samsung Galaxy S20 FE was having a “foreign object in charging port” error.
Samsung’s warranty partner in my area is a shop called ubreakifix, so I took it there, and he cleaned pocket lint out of the port and says it looks undamaged and now passes their tests, but Samsung told him that I had apps that were draining my battery.
I told him “Oh, Samsung phones are getting worse every year and with every software update. The last update brought in something called Facebook Services Manager, or something, and “Battery” told me that it was waking up and using power and the cell modem even though I don’t have Facebook. I had to force stop three Facebook apps/services and then disable them in the app settings. And that’s on top of having to use a different gallery program to view my photos without it pestering me to sign up for Microsoft Onedrive, and having to agree to terms for something called Bixby just to reassign the power key to turn off the power instead of shouting “HI I’M BIXBY!!!!!” wherever you happen to be at the moment.”.
He said, “Yeah, they have been going in that direction. Google phones don’t have all of that extra fluff.”.
Security updates have been issued by Fedora (community-mysql, containerd, dotnet3.1, dotnet5.0, perl-Encode, and tor), Mageia (gpsd), openSUSE (cacti, cacti-spine, go1.16, jetty-minimal, libmspack, mariadb, openexr, and tor), SUSE (aspell, jetty-minimal, libesmtp, mariadb, and unrar), and Ubuntu (firefox and mongodb).
Software vulnerabilities are a grave threat to the security of computer systems. They often go undetected for years until it is too late and the consequences are irreversible. In order to find these weaknesses, software security testers and developers often have to manually test the entire codebase and determine if any vulnerabilities exist. However, this can take months or even years of work due to the scale of modern software projects.
One way of handling all this is with fuzzing. The fuzzing process throws random input at code or software, looking for bugs that might not have been found with traditional testing techniques. In recent years, approaches like neural fuzzing have emerged to make application security testing faster and more accurate.
Why should they? There are far better ways to know what you do.
On Friday, I took my spouse to the Chicago Botanic Gardens.
It’s a nice place. I decided we had better get around to seeing it before the Cook County Democrats make it three times as expensive to get in next year. Citing higher foot traffic, they’ve gone from free admission and $25 to park a car, to $8 to park a car, and $26 per person, starting next year.
The Democrats are using the same math they use for figuring out what taxes will be, to exploit the fact that people go to the gardens for a day trip. Right now, that’s an affordable thing to do, but once it costs over $100 for a car with 4 people in it, it won’t be.
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Isn’t America great? You can become rich (or, more correctly, richer) by selling water in a box in depressing Repo Man Generic font, for $5 per 16 ounces. Of course you want to pay $5 for a box of water. You don’t want COVID do you?
And if you want to take your chances, have fun drinking tepid water because they turned off the refrigeration in the fountain for….well, reasons.
