The fact that Linux is open-source makes a best fit for many disciplines. Some of these are obvious like programming and software development, while many are subtle.
For example, if you are a graphic designer, can you use Linux to create graphic pieces? I don’t mean to create them just for the sake of trying out, but can you actually make a living doing graphic design on a Linux machine?
This article is an attempt to answer the latter question by giving the reader a list of graphic design software available on Linux and their features.
Every operating system comes with an application launcher where you have to mouse over the entire menu to launch an application. But, unlike other operating systems, Linux allows us to install other launchers as an alternative. In this post, We came up with the five best application launchers for Ubuntu and their installation process.
Ubuntu has a default application launcher, i.e., GNOME Shell application overview. If you are a beginner or a tech professional, browsing the entire menu to launch an application is quite bothersome. Linux community offers a wide variety of application launchers. From a rich UX-based to a bare minimum, Linux has everything to offer.
These application launchers offer many themes and come with a lot of customization. Choosing the right application launcher as per your need might be difficult. That’s why we came up with the five best application launchers. Here are the top 5 application launchers for your Ubuntu.
If you care about your personal data, you need to have a backup, and Pika Backup is one of those tools that you configure the way you like it and forget about it.
“Doing backups the easy way” – that’s the motto of Pick Backup, but the great thing about this utility is that it saves you time and disk space by not copying the entire data over and over.
If you're a musician of any kind, from beginner to professional, Linux provides an amazing assortment of free, yet powerful, platforms and applications that will boost your productivity and help you to show off your creativity.
Don't let the fact that these apps are free wrongly influence your judgment. They are high-quality, professional-grade applications that rival even the most well-known, high-priced, commercial applications. These are 10 of the best Linux apps for musicians of all levels.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Glances on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Glances is a cross-platform system monitoring tool written in Python. It displays a myriad of system statistics on the terminal or console and even includes a web mode that allows you to monitor your system on a web browser. This is a better alternative to the top and htop monitoring tools.
This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of the Glances system monitoring on Ubuntu 22.04 (Jammy Jellyfish). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 22.04 and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint, Elementary OS, Pop!_OS, and more as well.
Why use the Network-command-line Manager’s interface? Sometimes Ubuntu Network Manager behaves strangely, and you may be unable to connect to any Wi-Fi Hotspot using the GUI (Graphical user interface).
The Network Manager may fail to start, and even after manually restarting the service through the terminal, you may still have difficulties connecting to any Wi-Fi Hotspot, even a previously recognized and stored home network.
I encountered same problem on dual boot configurations and standalone Linux installs, and it was quite inconvenient, particularly during the WFH (Work from home) phase that we’re all going through.
In an earlier article we discussed how to add comments to iptables rules for clarity and documentation. In our opinion it is a good practice to comment anything someone else may have to work on in the future. Using comments in scripting is a common practice for good reason. We decided to write a quick tip on how to add a comment to UFW (Uncomplicated Firewall) rules.
I am not a huge fan of UFW or Firewalld. In my opinion they make managing netfilter harder, not easier. That is because I started using iptables over 20 years ago. I am very comfortable with it and tend to know the necessary syntax off the top of my head. That being said, adding a comment to UFW rules is much more intuitive than any other iptables front end.
Drupal is an open-source and popular content management tool that is the foundation of many websites across the internet. It has great standard features, like easy content authoring, reliable performance, and excellent security. Flexibility and modularity are some of the core principles that set it apart from the rest.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Drupal 9 on your Ubuntu 22.04 OS.
Blogger.com, as its name suggest is a blog service. Is very popular and it’s owned by google. You may want to take full control of your blog by setting up a WordPress on your server. But you still need your content: in this entry I’ll show you how to migrate from blogger to wordpress.
I’m assuming you already have a brand new WordPress installation. If not, here on unixcop.com we have several articles about wordpress.
Today we are looking at how to install Inkscape 1.2 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.
This article will cover a use case I suppose very personal, but I love the way I solved it so let me share this story.
I'm a gamer, mostly on computer, but I have a big rig running Windows because many games still don't work well with Linux, but I also play video games on my Linux laptop. Unfortunately, my laptop only has an intel integrated graphic card, so many games won't run well enough to be played, so I'm using an external GPU for some games. But it's not ideal, the eGPU is big (think of it as a big shoes box), doesn't have mouse/keyboard/usb connectors, so I've put it into another room with a screen at a height to play while standing up, controller in hands. This doesn't solve everything, but I can play most games running on it and allowing a controller.
But if I install a game on both the big rig and the laptop, I have to manually sync the saves (I'm buying most of the games on GOG which doesn't have a Linux client to sync saves), it's highly boring and error-prone.
Old, but stable, even more in when it comes to the feature set, and still getting its polishing now and then: your simple editor for the raw data of files, named Okteta.
What started in 2003 as a hex editing widget library for KDE3 (and Qt3), of course named KHexEdit (to be confused with the unrelated hex editor program that was part of KDE at that time), it turned into a first dedicated application by the title Okteta during the years 2006 to 2008 for KDE4 (and Qt4). From there on a small set of features was added once in a while, most impressively Alexander Richardson’s Structures tool in 2010,. Until then in 2013 the port to Qt5/KF5 was done (also to a good degree by Alexander). After that things had settled, the program working properly when needed, otherwise just left in the corner of the storage.
Now, nearly 2 decades after the first lines were written, the next port is to be done, to Qt6 and KF6. And this time the actual port is just amazingly boring: changing a few “Qt5” to “Qt6” in the buildsystem (and later some “KF5” to “KF6” once KF6 is ready), adding Qt6::Core5Compat as helper library for 1-2 classes that had not yet been substituted, adding a “const” to the argument of an overridden virtual method, adapting some “QStringList” forward declarations… and done.
Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from May 13 to May 20.
The latest version of FreeBSD, 13.1, was released this week for both 32 and 64-bit forms of x86, Arm, POWER – and 64-bit RISC-V.
FreeBSD is one of the oldest open-source Unixes that's still actively maintained and is directly descended from the original BSD Unix developed at the University of California at Berkeley in the 1970s: the Berkeley System Distribution.
Version 13.1 includes OpenZFS 2.1.4, OpenSSH 8.8p1, OpenSSL 1.1.1, support for newer Intel Wi-Fi chipsets, and defaults to UEFI in Amazon EC2.
Interviews with chip company CEOs are invariably enlightening. On top of the usual market-related subjects of success and failure, revenues and competition, plans and pitfalls, the highly paid victim knows that there's a large audience of unusually competent critics eager for technical details. That's you.
The Android port of Lagrange has progressed to a point where it's now running on a real device.
In 1991, Linus Torvalds started this fantastic Linux project and prior to that, Richard Stallman came up with the idea of GPL, the general public license. Thus, a new model to deliver software code in an open and transparent manner came into existence. Stallman can be quoted with the famous phrase: ââ¬Å¾If you think about open source, think free as in free speech, not free beer.“ After GPL and the first Linux kernels gained ground, more and more open source based business software was developed.
The Thunderbird team published the financial report of 2021 for the Thunderbird project last month. Revenue rose by 21% in 2021 to $2.796 million when compared to the $2.3 million the project earned in 2020.
The last time I went to Disneyland Paris, I used my smartphone to record the G-forces during some rides. I used an app called Physics Toolbox Accelerometer to record the acceleration to CSV files. Then, I made a small Python script to filter the data and plot it.
This is easily one of the ugliest pieces of software I've ever written.
When my brother died, he left behind two young sons--one in middle school and the other in elementary. He was also in the middle of a divorce that wasn't finalized, so he left his wife with many financial issues that did not seem easy to deal with.
My first Walkman was a cheap one from argos but it had a really high powered radio and I could listen to kiss 100 all the way from London (60 miles seemed a long distance) weirdly this seemed more impressive than being able to pick up foreign stations from unknown locations in Europe. The tape mechanism broke so I got an aiwa Walkman with an awesome graphic equaliser.
When I write the word “imagineering,” what does it mean to you? Does it make you think of a certain company or concept? Is that company or concept perhaps something related to a cartoon or a theme park? Yes, yes, I get it, the primary company that uses this phrase is culturally dominant—but what if I told you that Disney, despite using the word “imagineering” in an aggressive way for decades to describe its approach to innovation, didn’t actually come up with this term, and that other companies used it for years before Disney got around to trademarking the phrase? That’s imagineering for you. And today’s Tedium looks back at a term that one of the world’s largest companies has long claimed to have coined, even in the face of years of prior art.
Astronomers have captured a clear image of the gigantic supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy for the first time.
Sagittarius A*, or Sgr A* for short, is 27,000 light-years from Earth. Scientists knew for a while there was a mysterious object in the constellation of Sagittarius emitting strong radio waves, though it wasn't really discovered until the 1970s. Although astronomers managed to characterize some of the object's properties, experts weren't quite sure what exactly they were looking at.
The saga surrounding Arm's joint venture in China just took another intriguing turn: a mysterious firm named Lotcap Group claims it has signed a letter of intent to buy a 51 percent stake in Arm China from existing investors in the country.
In a Chinese-language press release posted Wednesday, Lotcap said it has formed a subsidiary, Lotcap Fund, to buy a majority stake in the joint venture. However, reporting by one newspaper suggested that the investment firm still needs the approval of one significant investor to gain 51 percent control of Arm China.
With Russia cut off from foreign processor makers Intel and AMD, the country has been scrambling to switch to more local CPUs and components.
Russia's latest step in securing supply chains for new computers comes in the form of a newly released desktop motherboard designed to support x86-compatible CPUs made by Chinese chip designer Zhaoxin, which is a joint venture between Taiwan's Via Technologies and the Shanghai municipal government.
The new motherboard, called MBX-Z60A, is made by electronics manufacturer Dannie, which has headquarters in Russia and China, according to a machine translation of an article published last week by Russian-language news aggregator Habr.
In recent days, concern over a global outbreak of monkeypox, a mild disease related to smallpox and chickenpox, has been hyped in the media and health ministries around the world, even prompting an emergency meeting at the World Health Organization (WHO). For some, fears have centered around monkeypox being the potential “next pandemic” after Covid-19. For others, the fear is that monkeypox will be used as the latest excuse to further advance draconian biosecurity policies and global power grabs.
Regardless of how the monkeypox situation plays out, two companies are already cashing in. As concern over monkeypox has risen, so too have the shares of Emergent Biosolutions and SIGA Technologies. Both companies essentially have monopolies in the US market, and other markets as well, on smallpox vaccines and treatments. Their main smallpox-focused products are, conveniently, also used to protect against or treat monkeypox as well. As a result, the shares of Emergent Biosolutions climbed 12% on Thursday, while those of SIGA soared 17.1%.
For these companies, the monkeypox fears are a godsend, specifically for SIGA, which produces a smallpox treatment, known by its brand name TPOXX. It is SIGA’s only product. While some outlets have noted that the rise in the valuation of SIGA Technologies has coincided with recent concerns about monkeypox, essentially no attention has been given to the fact that the company is apparently the only piece of a powerful billionaire’s empire that isn’t currently crumbling.
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However, by August 2001, BioPort stood to lose the Pentagon contracts – its only source of income. The Pentagon began preparing a report, due to be released in September 2001, that would detail a plan for letting BioPort go. Thanks to the September 11, 2001 attack on the Pentagon, that report was never released. Shortly thereafter, the 2001 anthrax attacks began.
Just months before, BioPort had contracted Battelle Memorial Institute to help rescue its flailing vaccine program. The deal gave Battelle “immediate exposure to the vaccine” and it was used in connection with the Pentagon-funded, gain-of-function anthrax program that involved both Ken Alibek and William C. Patrick III, two bioweapons experts with deep ties to the CIA. That program was housed at Battelle’s West Jefferson facility in Ohio. That facility is believed by many investigators to be the source of the anthrax used in the 2001 attacks.
The ensuing panic from the anthrax attacks led the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to intervene. They gave BioPort its license back in January 2002 despite persisting safety concerns at its vaccine production facility in Michigan. BioPort was not content to merely see its past contracts with the Pentagon restored, however, as it began lobbying heavily for new contracts for anthrax vaccines intended for American civilians, postal workers and others. They would get them, largely thanks to HHS’ then-counter-terrorism adviser and soon to be HHS’ newest Assistant Secretary — Jerome Hauer. Hauer would later join the board of BioPort, after it reformed as Emergent Biosolutions, in 2004.
I was checking how to remove background noise on calls so that everyone can be unmuted all the time. There's a tool, krisp.ai, that offers that for win and mac.
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How sad. It's a product that interfaces with pulseaudio, giving it access over every audio stream in your system. A wet dream for a spy agency. And of course, it got compromised.
We reported these findings to the PyPI registry shortly after catching and analyzing the package and the malicious package was taken down yesterday, just before reaching ~300 downloads.
Several bugs in Microsoft, Ubuntu and Tesla products were found and exploited during the three-day Pwn2Own hacking conference in Vancouver this week.
The conference – organized by Trend Micro’s Zero Day Initiative – gives hackers a chance to earn money in exchange for discovering and exploiting vulnerabilities in popular products.
By the end of day two on Thursday, the conference had paid out $945,000 in rewards, including $75,000 to hackers with offensive security company Synacktiv for two unique bugs found in the Tesla Model 3 Infotainment System.
The US Justice Department has directed prosecutors not to charge "good-faith security researchers" with violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) if their reasons for hacking are ethical — things like bug hunting, responsible vulnerability disclosure, or above-board penetration testing.
Good-faith, according to the policy [PDF], means using a computer "solely for purposes of good-faith testing, investigation, and/or correction of a security flaw or vulnerability."
Additionally, this activity must be "carried out in a manner designed to avoid any harm to individuals or the public, and where the information derived from the activity is used primarily to promote the security or safety of the class of devices, machines, or online services to which the accessed computer belongs, or those who use such devices, machines, or online services."
The inside story of the world’s most notorious commercial spyware and the big tech companies waging war against it.
Noura Al-Jizawi was a key figure in the Syrian uprising during the Arab Spring ten years ago. She was snatched from a bus, sent to prison without charges, tortured and emerged seven months later.
When Al-Jizawi finally left Syria, she assumed she’d be able to put this kind of heavy-handed repression behind her. Instead, she became the target of a new kind of high-tech despotism at the hands of Syria’s Bashar al-Assad regime.
And she’s not alone. Surveillance technologies now allow oppressive regimes to order up sophisticated, privatized subversion campaigns against their opponents as easily as they can order something on eBay. Al-Jizawi, now a researcher at the Citizen Lab, a University of Toronto organization that focuses on digital espionage and civil society, co-authored a report last month that focused on the toll the long arm of digital transnational repression takes on its victims.
In an interview with Click Here, Citizen Lab research assistant Noura Al-Jizawi comments on her experience being targeted by surveillance technologies. She sheds light on how such technologies enhance oppressive regimes’ ability to order up “sophisticated subversion campaigns.”
Facial recognition bans passed by US cities are being overturned as law enforcement and lobbyist groups pressure local governments to tackle rising crime rates.
In July, the state of Virginia will scrap its ban on the controversial technology after less than a year. California and New Orleans may follow suit, Reuters first reported. Vermont adjusted its bill to allow police to use facial recognition software in child sex abuse investigations.
Banking is a competitive, but they try to stay out of each other’s way. Why I like credit cards and hate annual fees. What is FICO and VantageScore?
I’ve been talking recently about Capital One’s nightmarish dispute process that is stacked against their customers, their higher-than-average interest rates if you carry a balance, and the fact that they’re a “subprime” bank that typically goes trawling to sign up the working class for their cards, even if they have a bankruptcy.
The first question I hear from some people is “Why do I need a credit score if I don’t intend to take on a big loan?”.
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Obviously, you shouldn’t go into debt if there is any other choice, but I know people with car loans that they signed to get to work, and then the interest rates were so high that they spent most of their money from work on the stupid car loan. So there’s a big difference between getting a car loan at 15% and getting one at 6-8%. 6-8% is subprime and 15% is predatory.
Garry Ridge, who runs the chemical company WD-40, has a leadership style guided by two sources — Aristotle, and the BlackRock chief executive Larry Fink.
“Pleasure in the job puts perfection in the work,” Mr. Ridge said first, quoting the Greek philosopher.
Then he picked up a recent BlackRock memo. “Companies who forged strong bonds with their employees have seen lower levels of turnover and higher returns throughout the pandemic,” Mr. Ridge read aloud.
This he punctuated with his own commentary: “Well, duh!”
The surprise Wednesday ruling by a panel of three federal appeals court judges allows Texas’ social media law to go into effect — and has led to panicked befuddlement among tech policy experts wondering how platforms could possibly comply, even if they wanted to, and what options the services have for challenging the ruling.
Microsoft search engine Bing censors terms deemed sensitive in China from its autosuggestion feature internationally, according to research from Citizen Lab.
The University of Toronto research organization analyzed the search engine's autosuggestion system for censorship of nearly 100,000 names in the United States, Canada and China in both English letters and Chinese characters. Testing was done by modifying region settings, language setting and IP address geolocation.
The first time I have ever heard of the Internet was in 1993 while still in high school. A school employee, still newly graduated from Stanford, often mentioned the e-mail -- something that was at the time mostly reserved to universities and libraries. The local public library had many of those VT-100 "dumb" terminals for catalogues and for access to various online resources. These terminals were text-only, black screens with either green or orange glowing ASCII letters. The library provided access to a number of Gopher sites and WAIS resources either via Telnet or with the Lynx browser.
I've finally gained access to the nascent World Wide Web in November of 1995 when I heard about a new Internet cafe in town. That place had 20 or so of those VT-100 terminals for free, and eight "X terminals" with Unix GUI frontends (with Netscape Navigator 2.0, Adobe Acrobat Reader, and RealPlayer!) at the price of $3.50 an hour (or, $30 for a 10-hour prepaid punchcard).
It is almost certain that widely-accepted and used cryptography is compromised and is not a threat to governments (otherwise we would see a serious push for other technologies which include backdoors). In fact it is very likely that NSA and other such players are actively introducing and supporting certain encryption technologies. Some even believe that bitcoin is an NSA creation, as the creator was never revealed, and bitcoin is _the most traceable_ method of transacting.
I think it is kind to say that Lagrange does one thing: browse the alternative protocols of the Internet. But in reality there are a few things it does well! What does it do?
At the bottom, it implements a few different protocols, methods to access various kinds of sites: gopher, gemini, spartan, finger. As an end user, I am happy that it does that pretty transparently - I don't have to 'turn on gopher mode' or anything like that, I can follow links and read.
Sparta, for them as don't know, is a variant of gemini, without the (imo) unnecessary overhead of tls. This all appears to be a project of Michael Lazar, who's jetforce I have been using to serve gemini here from the very beginning.