In the vast catalog of articles and videos that attempt to install a Linux distro on a gaming PC, there’s a central question missing: Why? Why would you go with Linux instead of Windows when Microsoft’s OS has clearly better driver and game support, as well as more prompt responses to issues and access to better utilities?
There are a few reasons, even if the scales generally fall in favor of Windows. For one, Linux is free from any central authority. You don’t have to worry about advertising IDs, features you don’t want or disagree with, or updates that may change the way you interact with your PC.
Kubernetes container orchestration platform is Kubernetes 1.24 Released, which allows you to manage a cluster of isolated containers as a single entity and provides mechanisms for deploying, maintaining and scaling applications running in containers. The project was originally created by Google, but then transferred to an independent site curated by the Linux Foundation. The platform is positioned as a universal solution developed by the community, not tied to individual systems and able to work with any application in any cloud environment. The Kubernetes code is written in Go and distributed under the Apache 2.0 license.
Features are provided for infrastructure deployment and management, such as DNS database maintenance, load balancing, distribution of containers across cluster nodes (migration of containers depending on changes in load and service needs), health checks at the application level, account management, updating and dynamic scaling of a running cluster, without stopping it. It is possible to deploy container groups with update and undo operations for the entire group at once, as well as logical splitting of the cluster into parts with resource sharing. There is support for live migration of applications that can be stored on both local storage and network storage systems.
The Kubernetes and sigstore communities have announced that Kubernetes is adopting sigstore in production for signing artifacts and verifying signatures, enabling Kubernetes users for the first time to verify that the distribution they are using is exactly what it claims to be. Kubernetes 1.24 and all future releases will include cryptographically signed sigstore certificates, giving users the ability to verify signatures and have greater confidence in the origin of each and every deployed Kubernetes binary, source code bundle and container image.
The v1.24 release of Kubernetes brings storage capacity tracking as a generally available feature.
Welcome to Hardware Addicts, a proud member of the TuxDigital Network. Hardware Addicts is the podcast that focuses on the physical components that powers our technology world.
In this episode, we’re going to be discussing a new storage technology that could change everything for quantum computing.
This week, Linux Out Loud chats about a community opinion piece by Profetik.
Welcome to episode 11 of Linux Out Loud. We fired up our mics, connected those headphones as we searched the community for themes to expound upon. We kept the banter friendly, the conversation somewhat on topic, and had fun doing it.
This week, Linux Out Loud chats about the Steam Deck and Valve’s Linux gaming foray.
Welcome to episode 12 of Linux Out Loud. We fired up our mics, connected those headphones as we searched the community for themes to expound upon. We kept the banter friendly, the conversation somewhat on topic, and had fun doing it.
New firmware superpowers are coming to a future Linux kernel, why Google is working on encrypted hibernation support, and a sneak peek at SteamOS 3.
We go back to our roots and begin with part one of how to get started with Linux. We discuss some basic terms and definitions, talk about installing software applications and even suggest a few distributions geared to new users.
Alex replaces another Google service; we point the community spotlight at FuzzyMistborn plus your feedback!
The world of music and audio production is largely dominated by proprietary software vendors. Among them, Steinberg stands out as a company that created some of the most-used software, including the Cubase and Nuendo digital audio workstations. Steinberg is also known as the creator of the VST plugin API that, largely due to its licensing policy, has irritated developers enough to inspire multiple attempts at creating an open-source alternative. Even now, when the VST3 SDK is available under the GPLv3 license, the way the company exercises its control over the SDK keeps pushing developers away toward other open-source solutions.
This is an introduction to open-source plugin APIs for musicians and sound engineers alike. It focuses on the options in the larger ecosystem and how their shortcomings led to the creation of new alternatives with liberal licensing.
The kernel gained support for the TLS protocol in the 4.13 release, which came out in September 2017. That support is incomplete, though, in that it does not provide the kernel with a way to initiate a TLS connection on its own. Instead, user space creates a socket and performs the TLS handshake before handing the socket to the kernel, which can then transfer data using TLS. The situation may be about to change as a result of this patch series from Chuck Lever — though user space will still need to remain in the picture.
TLS, of course, allows for the transfer of encrypted data over the network; it is the protocol that lurks behind HTTPS links, among other things. At this point, a significant fraction of the data transferred over the net is encrypted in this fashion. Once a connection has been established, encrypting data to send to the other end is relatively straightforward, as is decrypting received data. Establishing the connection, though, is a more complex affair, involving, among other things, algorithm negotiation and the provision and verification of public keys for one or both ends.
Subsystem maintainers routinely use git request-pull as part of the process of sending work upstream. Normally, the result includes a list of commits included in the request and a nice diffstat that shows which files will be touched and how much of each will be changed; examples abound on the kernel mailing lists. Occasionally, though, a repository with a relatively complicated development history will yield a massive diffstat containing a great deal of unrelated work. The result looks ugly and obscures what the pull request is actually doing. This document describes what is happening and how to fix things up; it is derived from The Wisdom of Linus Torvalds, which has been posted numerous times over the years (example 1, example 2).
 Automation is a hot topic right now. In my day job as a site reliability engineer (SRE), part of my remit is to automate as many repeating tasks as possible. But how many of do that in our daily, not-work, lives? This year, I am focused on automating away the toil so that we can focus on the things that are important.
One of the earliest things I learned about as a fledgling systems administrator was cron. Cron is used far and wide to do things like rotate logs, start and stop services, run utility jobs, and more. It is available on almost all Unix and Linux systems, and is something every sysadmin I know uses to help manage services and servers. Cron can run any console application or script automatically, which makes it very, very flexible.
 You might be wondering whether Linux really needs another music player. If it’s just a fork of an existing project, we’d agree that this wouldn’t be an enticing prospect. After all, in this field audiophiles are granted a huge array of fine music players. We covered our favorites in this roundup.
Amberol offers a different tack to some music players. It’s definitely not innovative in any shape or form. It doesn’t offer any functionality that a whole raft of open source players already offer. Instead it seeks to be a small and simple music player built using modern technologies.
When we read of modern technologies we instantly think of Electron. Heavily bloated apps often follow. But Amberol is not Electron-based. Instead, Amberol relies on the GTK4 widget toolkit and the Rust programming language. It seeks inspiration from Muine, a GNOME-based music player that saw its last release back in 2009.
I don't particularly like it when people announce their personal projects on their blog, but I'm making an exception for this one, because it's a little special for me.
You see, I have just released Wallabako 1.4.0 (and a quick, mostly irrelevant 1.4.1 hotfix) today. It's the first release of that project in almost 3 years (the previous was 1.3.1, before the pandemic).
The other reason I figured I would mention it is that I have almost never talked about Wallabako on this blog at all, so many of my readers probably don't even know I sometimes meddle with in Golang which surprises even me sometimes.
This release contains bug fixes to improve robustness. This release note describes what’s different between Istio 1.12.6 and Istio 1.12.7
On this site, we’ve gone over WordPress in great detail. Despite the fact that WordPress is the most popular and actively developed CMS, it is not the only good one on the market. In this article, we will go through Drupal in depth, determining who it may be used for and how to install Drupal on litespeed web server.
GNU, a recursive acronym for "GNU's Not Unix," is a collection of open-source tools that anyone can use for free to develop their own apps and operating systems. The GNU Project, founded by Richard Stallman, aims at developing and distributing software for free and provides every developer with open-source tools to do the same.
The Linux kernel is licensed under GNU's GPL (General Public License) and is thus known as GNU/Linux. Any operating system developed using the open-source GNU tools and the Linux kernel falls under the category of Linux distributions. But what are distributions, you might ask?
I got keystone in my Bifrost install to talk via LDAP to our Freeipa server. Here’s what I had to do.
I started with a new install of bifrost, using Keystone and TLS.
Basic access authentication dates back to 1993 and it’s still heavily used today. The server provides a WWW-Authenticate header to the client and the client responds with an Authorization header and a base64-encoded (not encrypted) string to authenticate. When done over a secure TLS connection, this method of authentication works well.
This is my third post about Image Builder, so I guess you could say that I enjoy using it1. It’s a great way to define a custom cloud image, build it, and (optionally) ship it to a supported cloud provider.
This post covers how to build a customized CentOS Stream 9 image along with a custom repository for additional packages. In this case, that’s Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux (EPEL).
There are various ways to append text to a file in bash. In computing, append means to add something to the end of the file.
In this tutorial, you will learn to append text or content to a file using the redirection operator >> and the tee command.
Firefox provides you with several mechanisms to protect your privacy. However, some of them are not enabled by default. In this guide you'll learn how to configure your Firefox browser settings to strengthen your online privacy.
In this video, I am going to show how to install Lubuntu 22.04 LTS.
Today we are looking at how to install Friday Night Funkin' - OS Engine on a Chromebook. Please follow the video/audio guide as a tutorial where we explain the process step by step and use the commands below.
Docker is a set of platform-as-a-service product that uses OS-level virtualization to deliver software in packages called containers. Containers are usually isolated from one another and bundled with their own software libraries and configuration files, they can communicate with each other through well-defined channels.
Docker makes it possible to get more apps running on the same old servers and also makes it easy to package and ship programs.
Docker-compose is a tool for defining and running multi-container Docker application. It uses YAML files to configure its application services.
Publications and presentations are important in the reputation of many companies and individuals. That’s why it pays to have tools that help with the design and management of labels and business cards that serve as an introduction to the service offered. So, today, you will learn how to install gLabels Publisher on Ubuntu 20.04.
Many novice users to Linux are surprised to learn that the most secure method to connect to another server with SSH is using keys.
We computer users have been conditioned to use passwords for everything.
It’s surprising to learn that there are methods other than passwords, but there is something better: cryptographic keys.
In this tutorial we will learn what SSH keys are and why they are better than passwords. You will learn how to set them up on your computer and how to use them to login with SSH without a password.
In this video for Help Net Security, Shani Dodge Reiner, Development Team Leader at Vicarius, explains how to identify vulnerabilities using the NMAP tool.
NMAP is a very powerful and popular tool for network mapping. It can be used to learn about the architecture of an organization’s network by both defenders and attackers.
Using the NMAP scan output, we can get visibility of the devices that are connected to the network. For each device, NMAP can extract a variety of information, including the device’s DNS name, MAC address, and operating system, as well as a list of ports that are open to the network, which services are accessible, etc.
Many popular programs are available on Linux exclusively as a DEB package. This could concern you if you have recently migrated to Arch Linux and are unsure how to install your favorite programs.
DEB files are intrinsic to Debian or Ubuntu-based derivatives. However, you can still install them on your Arch-based system in a few ways. Let's step through the ways to install DEB files in Arch Linux.
We all know that Java is a very popular programming language and a mainstay of today’s technology. This language is used for many things, from desktop applications to applications like Jenkins that are used to deploy other applications. In other words, Java is very important and for many it is the gateway to programming.
How to Add Swap Space on Ubuntu 22.04. Swap Space is a space in Linux is used when the amount of physical memory (RAM) is full. If the system needs more memory resources and the RAM is full, swap space let you store additional information.
Swap space can help machines with a small amount of RAM. In case you have a server with 1GB RAM, then your memory will get exhausted and you will get an error because your server cannot allocate sufficient memory.
In this guide you are going to learn how to add swap space and also remove the swap space that is created already.
Many distros no longer include both 32-bit and 64-bit bootloader support. Unfortunately some hardware including most based on the relatively recent Intel Atom processor architecture won't boot 'OOTB'. Whilst I wrote 'isorespin.sh' and 'isorespinner.sh' in part to address this issue I restricted their functionality to the Ubuntu 'family' of ISOs for support purposes. One of the most frequest questions I have been asked is 'can you add support for <insert distro> ISOs?'. Unfortunately distros, even those based on or derived from Ubuntu, are often built with different directory structures and packages. As a result writing a script that caters for multiple distros becomes complex and cumbersome. However with Ubuntu looking to move to a new snap-based installer I've revisited the 32-bit boot issue.
Initially I created a simple script 'treetoobitiso.sh' to just add the 32-bit GRUB bootloader to the Ubuntu 'family' of ISOs. But if a different distro uses a similar file system layout then essentialy there is no reason why it also wouldn't work so I've extended this script to include an '--unsupported' option to allow running, or at least attempt running, with any ISO.
packages. As a result writing a script that caters for multiple distros becomes complex and cumbersome. However with Ubuntu looking to move to a new snap-based installer I've revisited the 32-bit boot issue.
I am a new Ubuntu Linux 22.04 LTS server user. How do I set up an OpenVPN Server on Ubuntu Linux version 22.04 server to shield my browsing activity from bad guys on public Wi-Fi, set protective parameter vpn for developers and more?
Wine-wayland 7.7 Released, which develops a set of patches and the winewayland.drv driver, allowing you to use Wine in environments based on the Wayland protocol, without using XWayland and X11 components. Provides the ability to run games and applications that use the Vulkan graphics API and Direct3D 9/11/12. Direct3D support is implemented using the DXVK , which translates calls to the Vulkan API. The kit also includes patches and ” fsync ” to increase the performance of multi-threaded games, and code to support AMD’s FSR (FidelityFX Super Resolution) technology to reduce image quality loss when upscaling on high resolution screens. The new release is notable for syncing with the Wine 7.7 codebase and updating DXVK and VKD3D-Proton versions.
Wetlands, the newest supported game of the Hypno engine, is ready for public testing!
This sci-fi rail shooter was created by Hypnotix and published by New World Computing in 1995. The game includes 20 action-packed levels, cinematic cutscenes, attractive hand-drawn characters, and stunning 3D backgrounds.
Although they are not as common on Linux-based computers as they are on Windows, little by little games are coming to these open source systems . In fact, the titles available here are becoming more and more common, but at the same time they are not exempt from certain problems that can arise. For example, we can experience the always unpleasant crashes when we are playing with one.
Whether natively using certain applications such as Wine or PlayOnLinux , the truth is that the number of players who use a Linux computer for their favorite video games is increasing. This is something that we have been doing on a regular basis and over the last few years on a Windows-based PC. However, thanks to the fact that Linux is gradually spreading to a greater number of users, they also want to play here.
Oaken, a brand new Early Access turn-based tactical roguelike from Laki Studios and Goblinz Publishing, just added an experimental Linux build ready for testing. The Linux build is not yet advertised on the Steam page but it's there and mentioned in their latest news post.
Want to continue building up that collection of games? Another good chance has arrived with the Humble Kalypso Hits Bundle.
Cannibal Crossing, an action-survival game for 1-4 players from development teams at Rocketcat Games (Death Road to Canada) / Everplay Interactive / Blow and Try Again, continues evolving and gets some nice Steam Deck improvements.
In need of a fresh point and click comedy adventure? Catie in MeowmeowLand from developer ARTillery is now supported on Linux with a new Native build. Must admit I hadn't heard of this one before but the screenshots instantly make it look worth playing.
Path of Exile, the free to play ARPG from Grinding Gear Games, is getting close to releasing the Sentinel update and along with masses of gameplay additions — controller support will leave Beta.
Okular, KDE's popular multi-platform PDF reader and universal document viewer, has officially been recognized for sustainable software design as reflected in the recent award criteria for software eco-certification. In February 2022 Okular was awarded the Blue Angel ecolabel, the official environmental label awarded by the German government. Introduced in 1978, Blue Angel is the world's earliest established environmental label, and Okular is the first software product to be certified with its seal. What is more, Okular is the first €ever eco-certified computer program within the 30 organizations of the Global Ecolabelling Network! This network, of which Blue Angel is a member, represents over 50 countries.
After a long development phase, OpenMediaVault 6 has been released with a completely new user interface written from scratch.
OpenMediaVault (OMV) is a Network Attached Storage (NAS) system based on Debian. It includes SSH, (S)FTP, SMB/CIFS, RSync, BitTorrent client, etc. In addition, the framework’s modular design allows it to be expanded via plugins.
The sixth RC build of the 13.1-RELEASE release cycle is now available.
Installation images are available for:
o 13.1-RC6 amd64 GENERIC o 13.1-RC6 i386 GENERIC o 13.1-RC6 powerpc GENERIC o 13.1-RC6 powerpc64 GENERIC64 o 13.1-RC6 powerpc64le GENERIC64LE o 13.1-RC6 powerpcspe MPC85XXSPE o 13.1-RC6 armv6 RPI-B o 13.1-RC6 armv7 GENERICSD o 13.1-RC6 aarch64 GENERIC o 13.1-RC6 aarch64 RPI o 13.1-RC6 aarch64 PINE64 o 13.1-RC6 aarch64 PINE64-LTS o 13.1-RC6 aarch64 PINEBOOK o 13.1-RC6 aarch64 ROCK64 o 13.1-RC6 aarch64 ROCKPRO64 o 13.1-RC6 riscv64 GENERIC o 13.1-RC6 riscv64 GENERICSD
Note regarding arm SD card images: For convenience for those without console access to the system, a freebsd user with a password of freebsd is available by default for ssh(1) access. Additionally, the root user password is set to root. It is strongly recommended to change the password for both users after gaining access to the system.
Installer images and memory stick images are available here:
https://download.freebsd.org/ftp/releases/ISO-IMAGES/13.1/
The image checksums follow at the end of this e-mail.
If you notice problems you can report them through the Bugzilla PR system or on the -stable mailing list.
If you would like to use Git to do a source based update of an existing system, use the "releng/13.1" branch.
A summary of changes since 13.1-RC5 includes:
o OpenSSL 1.1.1o has been merged.
o An issue with the xhci(4) driver not attaching devices has been addressed.
A list of changes since 13.0-RELEASE is available in the releng/13.1 release notes:
https://www.freebsd.org/releases/13.1R/relnotes/
Please note, the release notes page is not yet complete, and will be updated on an ongoing basis as the 13.1-RELEASE cycle progresses.
=== Virtual Machine Disk Images ===
VM disk images are available for the amd64, i386, and aarch64 architectures. Disk images may be downloaded from the following URL (or any of the FreeBSD download mirrors):
https://download.freebsd.org/ftp/releases/VM-IMAGES/13.1-RC6/
BASIC-CI images can be found at:
https://download.freebsd.org/ftp/releases/CI-IMAGES/13.1-RC6/
The partition layout is:
~ 16 kB - freebsd-boot GPT partition type (bootfs GPT label) ~ 1 GB - freebsd-swap GPT partition type (swapfs GPT label) ~ 20 GB - freebsd-ufs GPT partition type (rootfs GPT label)
The disk images are available in QCOW2, VHD, VMDK, and raw disk image formats. The image download size is approximately 135 MB and 165 MB respectively (amd64/i386), decompressing to a 21 GB sparse image.
Note regarding arm64/aarch64 virtual machine images: a modified QEMU EFI loader file is needed for qemu-system-aarch64 to be able to boot the virtual machine images. See this page for more information:
https://wiki.freebsd.org/arm64/QEMU
To boot the VM image, run:
% qemu-system-aarch64 -m 4096M -cpu cortex-a57 -M virt \ -bios QEMU_EFI.fd -serial telnet::4444,server -nographic \ -drive if=none,file=VMDISK,id=hd0 \ -device virtio-blk-device,drive=hd0 \ -device virtio-net-device,netdev=net0 \ -netdev user,id=net0
Be sure to replace "VMDISK" with the path to the virtual machine image.
On April 20, 2022, we lost one of our longtime PCLinuxOS forum users. Alain Baudrez, who often went by the nickname Wamukota, chose euthanasia to end his suffering from ALS, or Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis.
I've read many postings and rants about Linux not being ready for the desktop, while my experience tends to state the opposite. Linux is -- and has been for the last couple of years -- ready for the desktop.
It all boils down to the type of audience you speak to.
Windows has been developed with the industry in mind. That implies that you have a group of well-trained IT guys who do the Windows laundry while you, at your desk, can work without bothering whether the latest patches are applied, the AV is up to date, Anti-malware filters are in place, ...
On April 17, 2010, Alain Baudrez (a.k.a. Wamukota) sent me a short story he had written, and asked me if I would be interested in running it in The PCLinuxOS Magazine. Set in the not too distant future, it's a story depicting the collapse of the World Wide Web.
Liked it? I loved it! I read it through three times upon receiving the story, and each and every time, my mind envisioned this story being told via a comic strip. I definitely wanted to do this story justice, so I started "shopping around" for someone with some graphic skills who might be able to tackle such a project. This was no small task.
Most of you will know the Netherlands as the country where Dutch is the native tongue, but Dutch is also spoken in the northern part of Belgium (Flanders). A total of 20 million people speak Dutch, so our community is an international community of 550 members with Dutch and Belgian admins, mods and users.
In 2001 I was diagnosed with ESRD (End Stage Renal Disease) which resulted in both my kidneys shutting down in March 2002. I had to go to the hospital three times a week to have my blood filtered using dialysis. Luckily I got a donor kidney on April 23, 2003. I can not express how grateful I am towards the unknown donor who saved my life.
The latest snapshot, 20220504, included the second LLVM update this week. The updated 14.0.3 version includes Application Programming Interface and Application Binary Interface changes for the new major LLVM 14 version. An update of libpipeline 1.5.6 fixed the handling of leading whitespaces for the C library used for manipulating pipelines of subprocesses in a flexible and convenient way. An update of sqlite3 3.38.3 pushed a fix that had effected missing rows in the output due to overly aggressive optimizing the automatic-index and Bloom-filter construction that used an inappropriate ON clause term. An update of yast2-trans had multiple Japanese, Polish, Slovak, Catalan and Brazilian Portuguese translations. The GPS daemon and library that supports USB and serial GPS devices, gpsd, updated to version 3.24. The new version now works with the open-source implementation of Networked Transport of RTCM via Internet Protocol 2.0. Other packages to update in the snapshot were swtpm 0.7.3 and unixODBC 2.3.10.
The 20220502 snapshot featured changes to the English dictionary package words; it updated from version 2015.02.15 to 2020.12.07 and had various new words added from previous version updates included in the five year jump. Several RubyGems packages were updated in the snapshot. One of those was the update of rubygem-gyoku 1.4.0, which translates Ruby Hashes to XML; the update removed Rubinius support and added options to allow for prettified XML outputs. The dpdk update in the snapshot had a Peripheral Component Interconnect change that assigns a driver pointer before mapping. Other packages to update in the snapshot were fribidi 1.0.12, power-profiles-daemon 0.11 and libX11 1.8, which is supposed to resolve a number of long-standing bugs with the libxcb integration.
This week we ‘only’ managed to get out 5 snapshots. Over the weekend, we had a dracut submission in the mix that happened to break in a few scenarios, resulting in an incomplete initrd. Of course, we caught this in openQA and did not release those snapshots. In the end, we release snapshots 0428, 0501, 0502, 0503, and 0504.
As all good things have to come to an end, my bachelor thesis has to end someday also. But I’m still looking forward to contributing to FMW, when are any updates or fixes needed. Official FMW 5.0.0 will be released soon. This was my first experience with an open source project and I liked it very much. I’m looking forward to start working on new open source projects in the future.
This project gave me a lot of experience such as learning how to deploy Qt applications on various operating systems, and how the structure of applications looks. I have learned the new programming language QML and how to use CMake in open source project. Another big experience for me is understanding how GitHub CI works. This was used to automatically create builds for various systems. I have practiced many options and advantages of Git (from the beginning I have been using only “git pull” with “git push”).
Hello World! We proudly present to you AlmaLinux 8.6 Beta "Sky Tiger" for x86_64, ARM and ppc64le architectures.
Installation ISOs are available on mirrors now. Cloud and container images are in progress, so stay tuned for these in the next few days.
As usual, a simple reminder, this is a BETA release. It should not be used for production installations. The provided upgrade instructions should not be used on production machines unless you don't mind if something breaks. Now if you wanna test this somehow, somewhere to see how things will work in 8.6 stable, you're on the right track.
AlmaLinux is an outstanding option for companies looking for a server-based operating system that can host a never-ending stream of services and applications. But for those who want to use AlmaLinux as a container deployment platform, you’ll have to migrate from Docker to Podman, as the container runtime supported by RHEL-based operating systems has switched, and getting Docker up and running on the OS is a serious challenge.
Here’s your weekly Fedora report. Read what happened this week and what’s coming up. Your contributions are welcome (see the end of the post)!
Fedora Linux 36 will be released on Tuesday 10 May.
I have weekly office hours on Wednesdays in the morning and afternoon (US/Eastern time) in #fedora-meeting-1. Drop by if you have any questions or comments about the schedule, Changes, elections, or anything else. See the upcoming meetings for more information.
The Fedora Project has changed its collective mind, and Fedora 37 won't require UEFI – it will still install and run on BIOS-only systems.
Last month we reported on some simplifications planned for Fedora 36 and 37. Aside from the changes to console graphics support, there was a proposal to require UEFI firmware, as a step towards removing support for booting using the old-style legacy BIOS boot process.
Apparently, this generated more discussion than several previous wildly contentious changes, including, in the words of project lead Matthew Miller, "systemd-resolved, btrfs-by-default, and even switching the default editor to nano."
F36 RC-1.4 is out 1 proposed blocker, GO/NOGO is tomorrow
Today there's no question that Linux, and open source, belongs at the heart of enterprise IT. 20 years ago, though, Linux was the underdog and it took a lot of faith to bet big workloads on Linux. Red Hat had the confidence that it could bring Linux into the enterprise, and delivered on it with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL).
The way we work keeps changing, but one thing is for certain: Remote work is here to stay.
Many large companies are implementing a hybrid model in which employees go to a physical office three days a week. HR and recruiting teams are revamping their hiring processes accordingly, with interviewing and onboarding remotely via Zoom and other virtual collaboration tools becoming the norm.
Interviews – whether remote or in-person – can be nerve-wracking. If you are someone who relies on reading body language and more nuanced expressions and cues for optimal communication, an interview on a screen might be your worst nightmare.
Relax – you can do this. Here are four tips to nail your next remote interview.
It’s a strange situation when someone can hold something hostage from halfway around the world. It’s tragic when your own pictures and files are remotely encrypted. But when it’s a hospital’s system? Ransomware becomes a problem about life or death.
Kaloom and Red Hat Deliver on Unified Edge Vision
A quick review of Debian-based Tails 5 which is released a while back, refreshed its core modules with Debian 11 Bullseye version.
 Ubuntu MATE’s lead, Martin Wimpress, has another fun project for Linux users.
In case you did not know, Martin regularly develops something interesting. Last year, we covered Quickemu, which helps create virtual machines in Linux through a QEMU-based GUI tool making the process easy.
A few days ago Qualcomm showcased their latest Wi-Fi 7 Networking Pro Series platforms that feature PHY data rates of 10.7, 16.5, 21.5 and 33 Gbps. According to Qualcomm, the Networking Pro 1620 SoC (System on Chip) can provide reliable and stable support for up to 2000 users.
Qualcomm indicated that their Networking Pro devices allow support for the Openwrt (Linux Kernel 5.4) operating system. Additionally, all their networking SoCs include Qualcomm’s Wi-Fi Security Suite which offer WPA3 implementation along with crypto accelerators to provide secure transactions across a full range of Wi-Fi access points.
I use a local Zim wiki to store many of my personal documents. Before then, I used flat text files with a homegrown directory structure, and prior to that I used Joplin. While I've tried to consolidate everything into Zim in recent months, I've still had a few notes lingering in other places. I finally got all of them moved to Zim yesterday, allowing me to remove two Syncthing directories in the process.
My motivation for using Zim is its portability. I've mentioned elsewhere that universal access is very important to me: I want my notes to be easily manageable using nothing but a generic text editor, while being standardized enough to allow dedicated programs to parse them and implement robust features inside them. Zim is the most feature-rich system I've found that gives me this flexibility.
The smallest Raspberry Pi-compatible SBC might not be a Raspberry Pi at all! Check out the smallest Raspberry Pis and alternatives.
Following up on our report for Linux 5.17 this summarizes the progress on mainline support for the Librem 5 phone and its development kit during the 5.18 development cycle. This summary is only about code flowing upstream.
This time it’s been all about various media drivers that are needed when using the cameras on the Librem 5 phone. As the mipi, csi and sensor drivers for the selfie cam are supported in the mainline kernel, we keep maintaining them as part of the community now. We sent these mostly minor but important fixes:
Our recent work on suspend to RAM resulted in some patches to various drivers that failed in that situation. Actually, suspend to RAM is not yet being tested very well by the community and we want to change that. Here, incidentally, we also fix camera-related drivers. Everything is interconnected.
Check out page 70 of the Mobile magazine, where our Telco CTO – Arno shares his comment on the Cloud-Based Smartphone.
This entire concept was build by on of the global telco operators using open source technology called Anbox Cloud. This technology presents many opportunities for mobile service providers.
The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has drawn attention to how clean our indoor environments are, and by measuring the CO2 levels within a room, infection risks can be approximated since more CO2 is correlated with poor ventilation. Software engineer Swapnil Verma had the idea to use computer vision to count the number of occupants within a space and attempt to gauge the concentration of the gas accordingly.
The hardware powering this project is an Arduino Portenta H7 combined with a Vision Shield add-on that allows the board to capture images. From here, Verma used a subset of the PIROPO dataset, which contains recordings of indoor rooms and ran the YOLOv5-based auto labeling utility within Edge Impulse to draw bounding boxes around people. Once labeled, a FOMO model was trained with a respectable F1 score of 91.6%.
Allwinner V853 SoC combines an Arm Cortex-A7 core with a Xuantie E907 RISC-V core, and a 1 TOPS NPU for cost-sensitive AI Vision applications such as smart door locks, smart access control, AI webcams, tachographs, and smart desk lamps.
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MangoPi team is also working on a compact (27.5Ãâ42.5 mm) MQ-V Ai Core module based on Allwinner V853 with 512 MB DDR3, 8GB eMMC flash, and an AXP2101 PMU, so we’ll certainly find out more in a couple of months.
Loop is a mobile app that helps you create and maintain good habits, allowing you to achieve your long-term goals. Detailed graphs and statistics show you how your habits improved over time. It is completely ad-free and open source.
Paperwork is a personal document manager. It manages scanned documents and PDFs.
It's designed to be easy and fast to use. The idea behind Paperwork is "scan & forget": You can just scan a new document and forget about it until the day you need it again.
In other words, let the machine do most of the work for you.
eSpeak is a compact open source software speech synthesizer for English and other languages, for Linux and Windows.
It is a reliable Text to Speech engine for English and many other languages. Compact size with clear but artificial pronunciation. Available as a command-line program with many options, a shared library for Linux, and a Windows SAPI5 version.
eSpeak uses a "formant synthesis" method. This allows many languages to be provided in a small size. The speech is clear, and can be used at high speeds, but is not as natural or smooth as larger synthesizers which are based on human speech recordings.
EasyShare, invoked via the "share" icon on the desktop, is now a GUI frontend to 'scrcpy'...
Comparing files, not a difficult task, easy peasy. Comparing files visually, not so much. Now and then, almost everyone will have a need to look at two versions of the same document and try to find the subtle differences between them. Sometimes, the application you're working with will have a built-in comparison feature, which makes things simpler. Sometimes, you will have to figure it out on your own, or use a dedicated program.
In Linux, there is a wealth of file comparison tools and utilities available, most of them built on top of the command-line diff program. They all follow the same basic principle of showing you two versions of the same file, side by side, and highlighting the changes and differences (hence the name). But one program stands out in this domain, and it's meld. To wit, we shall review.
Syncthing is an open-source encrypted peer-to-peer folder synchronization program. It uses deduplication techniques to reduce the amount of data it needs to transfer over the network; saving you bandwidth costs, energy, and time. You can now optionally also let it deduplicate data storage to reduce your storage costs.
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Syncthing chunks large files into blocks, similar to how a file system works. It compares which blocks have changed and will only send changed blocks over the network. The blocks can be reused between files and even between different synced folders. This saves transfer time, network bandwidth, and energy.
TaskJuggler is a modern and powerful, Free and Open Source Software project management tool. Its new approach to project planning and tracking is more flexible and superior to the commonly used Gantt chart editing tools.
TaskJuggler is project management software for serious project managers. It covers the complete spectrum of project management tasks from the first idea to the completion of the project. It assists you during project scoping, resource assignment, cost and revenue planning, risk and communication management.
Kavita is a fast, feature rich, cross-platform reading server. Built with a focus on manga and the goal of being a full solution for all your reading needs. Setup your own server and share your reading collection with your friends and family.
In the last two days of April, the small, picturesque town of Rovereto in northern Italy was the location of this year’s Linux Application Summit (LAS). After a virtual-only experience during the pandemic, the LAS returned with a physical presence, and so did we.
Canonical has long recognized the value and importance of LAS as a cornerstone of open-source cooperation and collaboration. And never before was this more evident than in the 2022’s event, organized by both KDE and GNOME in unison. We’d like to tell you a bit more about LAS, and give our spin to the story.
Percona is happy to announce the general availability of pg_stat_monitor.
Pg_stat_monitor provides a deeper and richer set of query analytics than has been available before. In addition to several additional metrics on previously run queries pg_stat_monitor introduces the ability to store query metrics in time series buckets as well as store metadata like explain plans from previous iterations of the queries.
The PGJDBC team is proud to announce release 42.3.5 of the JDBC driver for PostgreSQL
A number of issues have been addressed. A performance regression was found in the 42.3.x branch and was fixed
LibreOffice Community Edition is now at version 7.3.3. Read yesterday’s announcement on the Document Foundation blog to get the details of this incremental (bug-fix) update.
The 7.3.x releases are the bleeding edge of this popular office suite but nevertheless really stable software.
The Web-of-Trust (WoT) serves as an example of a decentralized authentication mechanism for OpenPGP. While there are some existing implementations of the WoT in applications such as GnuPG, their algorithms are often poorly documented. As a result, WoT support in client applications is often missing or inadequate.
This is where the aforementioned specification comes into play. This document strives to provide a well-documented description of how to implement the WoT in an interoperable and comprehensible way. There is already an existing implementation by the Sequoia-PGP project (Neal, the author of the specification is also heavily involved with Sequoia) which can serve as a reference implementation.
Since I imagine implementing the Web-of-Trust isn’t a straight-forward task (even though there is now a specification document), I decided to dedicate a series of blog posts to go along with my efforts. Maybe this helps others implementing it in the future.
The GCC developers are proud to announce another major GCC release, 12.1.
This year we celebrated the 35th anniversary of the first GCC beta release and this month we will celebrate 35 years since the GCC 1.0 release!
This release deprecates support for the STABS debugging format and introduces support for the CTF debugging format [1]. The C and C++ frontends continue to advance with extending support for features in the upcoming C2X and C++23 standards and the C++ standard library improves support for the experimental C++20 and C++23 parts. The Fortran frontend now fully supports TS 29113 for interoperability with C.
GCC now understands clangs __builtin_shufflevector extension making it easier to share generic vector code. Starting with GCC 12 vectorization is enabled at the -O2 optimization level using the very-cheap cost model which puts extra constraints on code size expansion.
On the security side GCC can now initialize stack variables implicitly using -ftrivial-auto-var-init to help tracking down and mitigating uninitialized stack variable flaws. The C and C++ frontends now support __builtin_dynamic_object_size compatible with the clang extension. The x86 backend gained mitigations against straight line speculation with -mharden-sls. The experimental Static Analyzer gained uninitialized variable use detection and many other improvements.
The x86 backend gained support for AVX512-FP16 via _Float16. The BPF backend now supports CO-RE, the RISC-V backend gained support for many new ISA extensions.
Some code that compiled successfully with older GCC versions might require source changes, see http://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-12/porting_to.html for details.
JavaScript’s universality is prompting the emergence of a new container-like abstraction, he said. Linux containers are not going way, but thinking in terms of JavaScript containers could simplify many web services. Dahl also noted that Docker popularized the use of Linux containers, with operating system-level virtualization for distributing server software. Each container image is a dependency-free, ready-to-run software package. But browser JavaScript offers a similar hermetic environment at a higher level of abstraction, he sai
There are a lot of ways of building software, there are many languages you could choose to build it with, many libraries to rely on, many frameworks to leverage, many architectural approaches, many platforms to choose, many paradigms of daily operations to follow.
A new release 0.4.16 of RQuantLib arrived at CRAN earlier today, and has been uploaded to Debian as well.
QuantLib is a very comprehensice free/open-source library for quantitative finance; RQuantLib connects it to the R environment and language.
The release of RQuantLib comes agaain about four months after the previous release, and brings a a few small updates for daycounters, all thanks to Kai Lin, plus a small parameter change to avoid an error in an example, and small updates to the Docker files.
Python's super() built-in function can be somewhat confusing, as highlighted by a huge python-ideas thread that we started looking at last week. It is used by methods in class hierarchies to access methods and attributes in a parent class, but exactly which class that super() resolves to is perhaps a bit unclear in multiple-inheritance hierarchies. The discussion in the second "half" of the thread further highlighted some lesser-known parts of the language.
This convention is not without consequences, however. One of those consequences is that the mean "goodness" of humanity is less, because its accomplishments have been appropriated away while its crimes stayed.
Coleoid cephalopods camouflage on timescales of seconds to match their visual surroundings. To date, studies of cephalopod camouflage-to-substrate have been focused primarily on benthic cuttlefish and octopus, because they are readily found sitting on the substrate. In contrast to benthic cephalopods, oval squid (Sepioteuthis lessoniana species complex) are semi-pelagic animals that spend most of their time in the water column. In this study, we demonstrate that in captivity, S. lessoniana Sp.2 (Shiro-ika, white-squid) from the Okinawa archipelago, Japan, adapts the coloration of their skin using their chromatophores according to the background substrate. We show that if the animal moves between substrates of different reflectivity, the body patterning is changed to match. Chromatophore matching to substrate has not been reported in any loliginid cephalopod under laboratory conditions. Adaptation of the chromatophore system to the bottom substrate in the laboratory is a novel experimental finding that establishes oval squid as laboratory model animals for further research on camouflage.
Twitter user Kepler_L2 reports that AMD's upcoming RDNA3-based Navi 31 high-end GPUs appear to offer PCIe 5.0 X16 support according to the latest AMD’s GFX11 architecture patches for Linux. Nvidia's Ada Lovelace next gen GPUs could get the same treatment, but rumor has it that these might launch at a later date.
It's not possible to ban abortions. It's only possible to ban safe abortions.
Microsoft has been forced to warn users to uninstall the Windows 11 update KB5012643, as it appears to be causing some apps to crash, especially if they rely on the .NET 3.5 framework.
As WindowsLatest explains, KB5012643 – which is an optional update for Windows 11 – brings several fixes to the operating system, but some people are reporting that apps that rely on the .NET 3.5 framework – which is quite a few – have been crashing since installing the update.
While not every user has been affected, and not all apps using .NET have been crashing, the issue is widespread enough for Microsoft to issue a rather humiliating message to users, telling them to uninstall the update.
The Paris Call for Trust and Stability in Cyberspace is an initiative launched by French President Emmanuel Macron during the 2018 UNESCO’s Internet Governance Forum. It’s an attempt by the world’s governments to come together and create a set of international norms and standards for a reliable, trustworthy, safe, and secure Internet. It’s not an international treaty, but it does impose obligations on the signatories. It’s a major milestone for global Internet security and safety.
Cory Doctorow published an interesting article this month about the possibility of Undetectable backdoors for machine learning models. Given that machine learning models can provide unpredictably incorrect results, Doctorow recounts that there exists another category of “adversarial examples” that comprise “a gimmicked machine-learning input that, to the human eye, seems totally normal — but which causes the ML system to misfire dramatically” that permit the possibility of planting “undetectable back doors into any machine learning system at training time”.
Security updates have been issued by Debian (dpdk, mruby, openjdk-11, and smarty3), Oracle (thunderbird), Red Hat (thunderbird), SUSE (chromium, libvirt, python-Twisted, and tar), and Ubuntu (cron and jbig2dec).
Google's researchers disclosed the Linux vulnerability in January and also introduced a fix that was responsibly disclosed to Linux vendors. However, it has taken a few months to fix this vulnerability in Google's own Android operating system.
Running code from inside a cloned Git repository is potentially risky, but normally just inspecting such a repository is considered to be safe. As a recent posting to the Git mailing list shows, however, there are still risks lurking inside these repositories; code that lives in them can be triggered in unexpected ways. In particular, malicious "bare" repositories can be added as a subdirectory of a repository; they can be configured to run code whenever Git commands are executed there, which is something that can happen in surprising ways. There is now an effort underway to try to address the problem in Git, without breaking the legitimate need for including bare repositories into a Git tree.
In early April, Glen Choo posted to the list about the security risk of bare repositories in Git working tree. He linked to an admirably detailed advisory from Justin Steven that documents the problem and how it can be triggered by a wide variety of tools, including shells, integrated development environments (IDEs), editors, and more. The advisory has proof-of-concept (PoC) code for a whole slew of different scenarios, including ones that can be used to reproduce the problem locally, if desired.
The country has ordered companies operating VPNs to collect user data and hand it over to officials—but they’re refusing to do so.
VPN companies are squaring up for a fight with the Indian government over new rules designed to change how they operate in the country. On April 28, officials announced that virtual private network companies will be required to collect swathes of customer data—and maintain it for five years or more—under a new national directive. VPN providers have two months to accede to the rules and start collecting data.
The justification from the country’s Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) is that it needs to be able to investigate potential cybercrime. But that doesn’t wash with VPN providers, some of whom have said they may ignore the demands. “This latest move by the Indian government to require VPN companies to hand over user personal data represents a worrying attempt to infringe on the digital rights of its citizens,” says Harold Li, vice president of ExpressVPN. He adds that the company would never log user information or activity and that it will adjust its “operations and infrastructure to preserve this principle if and when necessary.”
Instead of regarding the people of Russia and Ukraine as equally precious members of the human family, we have bent over backwards not to condemn the killing of citizens of one country by those of the other.
Said a press release from the DeSantis regime, “We hope that this is a misunderstanding…The Holocaust should never be politicized.”
The Nazi Party killed over 60,000 LGBT Germans in the concentration camps with the same Zyklon B gas and bullets that they used on the Jews (among others), they tossed the bodies into the same furnaces, they took the gold fillings out of their teeth and smelted them.
Their first step was to marginalize them, as Governor DeSantis has done in Florida.
With regards to the Holocaust being politicized, it was the Nazi Party, a far-right populist party, that brought about the Holocaust and selected its victims.
So it is entirely appropriate that they don’t want far-right populist politicians to use them as a background for their lip service about the rights of humanity.
“What is meant by economic progress, and how should it be measured?,” asked economists Diane Coyle and Leonard Nakamura in a recent paper, Time Use and Household-Centric Measurement of Welfare in the Digital Economy. “The conventional answer is growth in real GDP over time or compared across countries, a monetary measure adjusted for the general rate of increase in prices. However, there is increasing interest in developing an alternative understanding of economic progress, particularly in the context of digitalization of the economy and the consequent significant changes Internet use is bringing about in production and household activity.”
Gross Domestic Product (GDP) became the accepted international measure of economic progress in the 1940s. It was a good measure for an industrial economy dominated by the production of physical goods, but GDP doesn’t reflect important economic activity beyond production, such as income, consumption and quality of life, nor does it capture measures of economic welfare or utility, that is, the extent to which a service or good satisfies an individual’s wants and needs. In addition, GDP doesn’t include the value of the increasing amounts of free information goods now available in the Internet-based digital economy, including email, texts, social media, maps, apps and videos.
In their paper, Coyle and Nakamura propose an alternative approach for measuring economic progress based on how much time people spend on different daily activities - e.g., paid work, household tasks, leisure, and consumption - combined with measures of well-being while engaged in these different activities. “In an economy that is four-fifths services rather than goods, with time to consume therefore inherent in the majority of economic activity, the utility of the different uses of time seems key to understanding economic welfare as well as productivity.”
The deal will keep on all McColl's stores and staff with higher pay for many, but will not include its pension scheme, they said.
EG Group declined to comment. The Issa brothers and TDR also own Asda. EG and Asda are run as separate businesses.
McColl's runs 1,100 stores, including convenience outlets under its own name and Morrisons Daily, as well as Martin's newsagents. Around 6,000 of its staff are full-time.
The company earlier announced it was going into administration, a form of protection from creditors, appointing PriceWaterhouseCoopers (PWC) as administrators.
For the month of April 2022, IFF has filed 40 RTI applications. In response to our application seeking information on compliance with the directions of Anuradha Bhasin vs Union of India with the state of Arunachal Pradesh, we found that 7 orders regarding the suspension of telecom services have been issued by the state home department, while Sikkim responded that no internet shutdown orders were issued since 10.01.2020 by the state.
Mike Wacker, a former Google engineer, has repeatedly claimed that Google engages in manual manipulation of search results. Not only that, Mike Wacker called out CEO Sundar Pichai for lying to Congress about the matter.
This was in addition to then-anonymous claims that he himself had been advised to reorder search results. Google has been repeatedly criticized for manipulating search results, especially by burying and censoring conservative content while raising positive results for left-wing content.
In testimony before the House Judiciary Committee in December 2018, CEO Sundar Pichai was asked directly by Representative Zoe Lofgren (Democrats-CA) if "there wasn't a little man sitting behind the curtain figuring out what we [Google] are going to show the user."
Sundar Pichai said, "We don't manually intervene in any particular search result."
Mike Wacker explained in a post on Medium that he was able to find where Google had actually altered search results regarding abortion. Google had a special file regarding blacklisted topics, and if searches were performed regarding these topics, an alternative algorithm would trigger alternative search results.
Another former Google engineer, Zack Voorhies in a recent interview with The Epoch Times, said that Google tweaked its algorithm to ensure that the negative stories in the mainstream media about former President Trump were what people saw when they used its search engine, the world's most popular search engine. Zach Vorhies said that the tech giant specifically changed its news algorithm to harm the former president.
"As a Google whistleblower, Vorhies turned over 950 pages of internal Google documents to the Justice Department's antitrust division detailing Google's extensive censorship project. This project is called "Machine Learning Fairness," which has already corrupted Google Search, YouTube, and News products. This, along with various blacklists and secret page rankings, is being used by Google to manipulate public opinion according to a hidden agenda."
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Developer Jamie Kyle wrote (in a removed post, but still on the wayback machine), "I think it's time to publicly share how Microsoft stole my code and then spit on it."
Kyle - whose formidable open source pedigree includes contributing to Babel, Flow, Yarn, and serving on the TC39 steering committee - created Lernajs, a lightweight tool for organizing and managing JavaScript packages across projects. The result is that a team at Microsoft apparently mirrored the Lernajs codebase and renamed it Rushjs. They didn't fork it, which would be a totally legal open source thing to do. Instead, it appears - according to Kyle's very convincing and publicly documented timeline of events on GitHub - that Microsoft employees essentially copy/pasted Lernajs.
As an adult, Kyle tried to find out what happened, approach the other party, and collaborate on a resolution to the problem. Basically, Kyle just wanted public recognition of Rushjs' origins. "So I reached out to the people I knew at Microsoft. This was probably a year ago. They were shocked and apologized. But since then, nothing has happened," Kyle wrote. "Oh wait, yes, something did happen. Rushjs history was messed with and a lot of the code was moved, functions renamed, rewritten.... Instead of just updating a license or even adding a footnote, they went through all this work, to not give credit to the real author of the program."
This is just one of the cases where Microsoft has appropriated other people's code without giving anything in return, not even credit to the original author. Let's not forget Keivan Beigi, who created AppGet, a software that copies the features of the Linux model of apt-get software installation and maintenance. At that time, the product manager of Microsoft's Applications Division expressed interest in the AppGet project with Keivan, and on the premise of inviting him to join the Microsoft team, they had many in-depth exchanges about the design ideas of the AppGet project, with a 5-moon time frame. But in the end, Microsoft suddenly lost touch with Keivan and launched the WinGet project whose design ideas and code structure were highly similar to AppGet after half a year.
