In 2016, I filed an antitrust complaint against Lenovo with the state government of Illinois, which opened an investigation. I believe I still have most of the documents about that. They entered into a settlement agreement with me in which they agreed to release “non-official” firmware that was “Linux-compatible” and arrange to knock it off on their future laptops, in exchange for me dropping my complaint.
Yet here we are in 2022, and I suppose they haven’t technically violated that agreement, however, as you can still run the firmware in a non-default configuration in two ways to get GNU/Linux to load on an affected system. Apparently, there’s an option to re-enable the 3rd party Microsoft key in the UEFI setup, or you can just go in there and turn Secure Boot to “Disabled”.
Linux boots either way on my Lenovo ThinkBook 15 ITL Gen2, which was Ubuntu certified (I am currently writing this in Fedora 36 and pleased as punch with the way my computer is operating.), but I turned off “Secure Boot”. There have been numerous issues with it, since it was designed by shitheads and implemented clumsily on GNU/Linux by another one who even got a Free Software Award for doing so, but when it is off you don’t run into any problems with it and you don’t have to figure out how to administer it and what to do when an OS fucks up something called a “dbx” that I don’t even want to read about.
The whole system sucks. It is over-designed and full of bugs, and even assuming the user had any meaningful and straightforward way of controlling it that was guaranteed to be there (they don’t), more points of failure can only cause more breakdowns in any system.
We’ve seen cases where people just left “Secure” Boot on because that’s what OEMs and people like Garrett recommend to do, and if they boot this OS or that OS in the wrong order, or load Windows, then their other operating systems can become quite unusable without going in there and resetting everything to factory settings and turning it off anyway.
“Secure” Boot is a disaster waiting for a time and place to happen if you leave it on and for most users, especially ones that use competently designed operating systems, it brings nothing good to the table.
I’m just crazy and want my computer to load what I tell it to.
And I’m not even the first one to notice Lenovo and their insane defaults, btw.
In 2012(?), Mr. Garrett himself blogged on whatever he was using back then that there was a Lenovo laptop that only booted if the boot manager was called “Windows” or “Red Hat Enterprise Linux”, and I don’t think they ever fixed that.
NewsWaffle is a site in Geminispace that relays major news Web sites into a Gemini browser, such as my favorite, Lagrange. (Which I have installed on Fedora GNU/Linux from Flatpak.)
The Gemini protocol doesn’t do much of anything that you can’t do already on the Web, if you want to use a subset of Web functionality.
However, the point of constraining Gemini is to prevent people from being tempted to abuse sites in the direction in which the Web started to go in the mid to late 90s when browser vendor wars erupted, and ridiculous Web technologies and “incompatibility as a feature” arose, and companies started to find fundamentally inefficient and insecure technologies such as JavaScript easy to use in order to spy on the users and make their computer spend time doing things that they did not want it to do.
Modern Web sites have gotten so grotesque that when you load their articles through Gemini using NewsWaffle, you can see the comparison between the HTML junk that it parsed, and the text that it cached and sent along to you. Oftentimes, just the HTML, not the style sheets, videos, JavaScript, or images, is 100 times larger than the Gemtext.
One way to enhance your Linux system’s security is by adding an extra security layer using SELinux. With Security-Enhanced Linux (SELinux), the applications on your Linux systems get isolated from each other, protecting your host system. By default, Ubuntu uses the AppArmor, a Mandatory Access Control system which enhances the security, but you can use the SELinux to achieve the same.
SELinux is beneficial, and in case of a security breach on your system, it prevents the spread of the breach to protect your system. Moreover, the tool protects the web servers depending on the mode you set for the SELinux. This guide offers a hands-on tutorial on how to disable the AppArmor, install the SELinux, enable the different modes, and disable SELinux.
Often, you may need to convert or add the images to the PDF files, especially if you have an application and you want the users to download the images as PDF files.
There are different online tools that convert the images to PDF. But security is always a concern, and you can’t trust these online sites with your data. The best method is to convert the images on your machine. Linux offers various command-line utilities to aid you with that. The two common tools are Img2PDF and ImageMagick.
In this guide, we will demonstrate how to install and configure HAProxy on RHEL 9 with Apache HTTP Server step by step.
HAProxy stands for High Availability Proxy. It is an opensource and high-performance TCP/HTTP load balancer and reverse proxy for web applications. It works by distributing traffic across multiple backend web servers using a specified algorithm to prevent an application from being flooded by requests.
Top websites that use HAProxy in their software stacks include Twitter, Reddit, Tumblr and Stack Overflow.
CentOS 9 Stream incorporates many applications and packages with recent versions. This is generally good because it allows us to take advantage of the new features they incorporate. However, there are times when we have to install previous versions of components such as PHP. So, in this post, you will learn how to install PHP 7.x on CentOS 9 Stream.
PHP is a web-oriented programming language. On CentOS 9 Stream version 8.1 is available, but there are times when we need an earlier version. In this sense, PHP 7.x still has some way to go, and many web applications require it.
As a Linux administrator or growing Linux user, you will come across plenty of sysadmin routines that seem general yet are a must-have skill. Once such routine/skill relates to user and group administration. Such skill is important in Linux user account management where permissions (access controls) and audits are enforced by a privileged system user.
This article will help us understand the implementation of the Linux sysadmin role related to adding a Linux user to multiple Linux groups. Therefore, to be fluent in this article guide’s walk-through, we will also need to briefly touch on user management and group management as separate modules in Linux user and group administration.
EasyOS 4.0 introduced running the session in RAM, specifically ZRAM, which is compressed RAM. This meant that the top read-write layer of the aufs layered filesystem is in RAM, which eliminates writes to the physical drive until specifically perform a session-save. It also has a speed advantage. And a security advantage.
However, the traditional pre-4.0 behaviour, direct writing to the working-partition, can be reverted to. If you have a good quality SSD, you will probably find it will last "forever" anyway. I have been using "reasonable quality" flash sticks for years, without failure. But then, not on a continuous basis, as I my regular daily startup is a frugal install in a HDD.
We are pleased to announce the latest NST release: "NST 36 SVN:13232". This release is based on Fedora 36 using Linux Kernel: "kernel-5.18.10-200.fc36.x86_64". This release brings the NST distribution on par with Fedora 36.
Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue 743 for the week of July 3 – 9, 2022.
If the soap opera of Microsoft's relationship with open source had a theme tune, it'd be "The Long and Winding Goad".
To a company whose entire existence depended on market control, open source's radical freedoms were an existential, cancerous threat. In return, open source was only too happy to play the upstart punk movement to Microsoft's bloated prog rock.
In the end, both sides accepted the inevitable. Redmond wasn't going to control the cloud and mobile the way it controlled business IT, and the cloud and mobile loved open source. Interoperability was more profitable than insults. For its part, open source was, well, open. It couldn't stop Microsoft's newfound friendliness so wary acceptance became the new world order.
Strategy in motor racing can be weird. Normally you want to be in front, and you time your pit stops and make your tyre choices to avoid your rival getting ahead. But this weekend in Austria, Ferrari were happy to give Leclerc a strategy that involved passing Verstappen three times. He made the passes, and won the race, despite a throttle pedal that in the last few laps stayed on when he lifted his foot. His team mate Sainz should have been second but his engine blew and his car caught fire. "No! No! No!" he said, understandably.
Heres a post for anyone interested in mushroom growing. This document is my personal notes on making brown rice flour (BRF) cakes and using the Pf Tek procedure to fruit.
A big 'ol list of the hikes I've done, with a quick description/review for each, updated as I do more hikes.
Of course, last night, I tested positive for COVID again, so that kind of marrs the whole thing, but I'll get over it, lol.
going to try to make this page for notes about deconstructionist historian hayden white i think. white is my new pet fixation so i want to have a home for his ideas as i understand them.
zshbrev allows you to mix zsh code and brev code. Not for polished li’l “eggs” but for your own duct tape and chewing gum hacking and automation. Quick and dirty.
* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It's like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.