After I mentioned that Lenovo are now shipping laptops that only boot Windows by default, a few people pointed to a Lenovo document that: Starting in 2022 for Secured-core PCs it is a Microsoft requirement for the 3rd Party Certificate to be disabled by default.
"Secured-core" is a term used to describe machines that meet a certain set of Microsoft requirements around firmware security, and by and large it's a good thing - devices that meet these requirements are resilient against a whole bunch of potential attacks in the early boot process. But unfortunately the 2022 requirements don't seem to be publicly available, so it's difficult to know what's being asked for and why. But first, some background.
The thing about free and open source apps is that anyone can take the source code and make their own version of an app with few (or no) changes. Many open source licenses even allow you to redistribute your version of an app. So it’s unsurprising that app stores are sometimes litters with unofficial versions of popular apps… sometimes with “developers” charging money for apps that are normally available for free.
In order to crack down on that, Microsoft recently updated its Microsoft Store policies to prohibit sales of open source apps that are available for free from other sources (such as the developer’s website or GitHub). But some developers of free and open source software do make their software available for free download from some locations while charging a fee for the same software when downloaded from app stores… so Microsoft has gotten some pushback.
Information about AMD’s next-generation RDNA3 architecture keeps trickling down. This time around we have a report about AMD’s DCN display controllers for the upcoming RX 7000 series GPUs and the Phoenix Point APU thanks to Coelacanth’s Dream. The report also contains some interesting data regarding AMD’s Infinity Cache on RDNA3.
We wrote about the UP 4000 SBC with an Intel Apollo Lake processor and Raspberry Pi form factor yesterday. But today, I noticed the UP community had put up a benchmarks comparison between the UP 4000 board, the original UP board (Atom x5-8350), the Raspberry Pi 4, and NVIDIA Jetson Nano.
 Viewing images direct in a terminal used to come at a serious disadvantage. The vast majority of terminal emulators display images using block-characters. Images can be displayed using half blocks or quarter blocks, the former offers the ability to display pixels with colour-accuracy. Whether half blocks or quarter blocks are used, pixelation is evident.
But you don’t need to suffer pixelation when viewing images, as the Kitty Graphics Protocol lets us display 24-bit color high definition images direct in your terminal.
Terminals that support the Kitty Graphics Protocol include Kitty, WezTerm, Konsole, and wayst. Unfortunately, the vast majority of terminal emulators do not support the protocol. Instead, these terminal emulators may only support Sixel (“six pixels”), a bitmap graphics format which consists of a pattern six pixels high and one wide, resulting in 64 possible patterns.
Calibre is a popular open-source eBook reader for Linux, macOS, and Windows. It is also available for the ARM platform (Linux).
It happens to be one of the best eBook readers for Linux.
After a year and a half of development, a new major upgrade for Calibre has finally landed.
The apt command is used for package management in Debian and Ubuntu. While you are probably already familiar with the install and remove options, apt provides a few extra features as well.
One of them is the ability to see all the upgradable packages on your system.
Xandikos is a free open-source self-hosted CalDav and CardDav server that uses Git as a backend.
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The project is released and licensed under the GNU GPLv3 (or later).
As many parents complain about YouTube in-video ads that target their kids, we find that it's our duty to find the best kids-friendly YouTube app alternative that protects your child privacy.
So here, we introduce: SkyTube.
SkyTube is not your regular YouTube app alternative, firstly, it does not depend on Google Apps API like the YouTube App.
Secondly, it allows the user (parent) to block certain videos, channels, or even a specific language.
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SkyTube is an open-source project that is released under the GPLv3.0 License.
Compared to some other solutions, Docker is more user-friendly, offers plenty of GUI applications (so you don't have to always work from the command line), and is supported by Linux, macOS, and Windows.
Naturally enough, when you run a command or script the system executes it as a process that was launched by you. But you can run commands and scripts as another user.
Most of them are pre-owned with valid Windows 10 licences, but installing a clean Windows 10 seems impossible now without setting up a Microsoft account and its associated control freakery – which I don’t want.
If I was convinced it was only for security, I might go for it but, and I am no expert, it feels a lot more like ever-more-coercive integration between me and a company (please correct me below if I am wrong here). Anyway, I have had a lot of success installing and using Ubuntu Linux (thanks to Canonical and the rest of the Linux world for making it so nice to use, and effective, and free).
However, through no fault of anyone – I think it is a not-everyone-has-caught-up situation – I am really struggling to install Eagle PCB (free version), and the two 3d printing ‘slicers’ Cura and Prusa Slicer into (onto?) Ubuntu 22.04 LTS.
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With Ubuntu 20.04, Ultimaker Cura (the AppImage file) has installed straight away without needing the command line (Just right click the file and set it to ‘make executable’, then right click it again to run it.
Synaptic Package Manager is a lightweight GUI software manager that uses the APT package manager as a backend to install, uninstall, update, and list packages in Debian-based distributions.
There was a day when we used to recommend Synaptic over the APT package manager to new Linux users. However, the GUI software manager recommendation remains the same, only replaced by more modern tools such as GNOME Software and KDE Discover.
Learn how to install, configure, and use firewalld to restrict or allow a computer's access to services, ports, networks, subnets, and IP addresses.
While Visual Studio Code isn't included in OpenShift Dev Spaces by default, it can be installed easily, giving access to a rich extension ecosystem.
SMPlayer is a free, open-source media player with built-in codecs that can play virtually any video and audio format. SMPlayer doesn’t need any external codecs and provides many exciting features, like the ability to play YouTube videos and search for subtitles or cast to external devices. Even though SMPlayer is available for all major platforms, including Windows, macOS, and Linux, it’s still one of the best options for Linux users because of its simple user interface and flexible settings.
In addition, SMPlayer is also portable, so you can carry it around on a USB drive and use it on any computer without leaving traces behind. So if you’re looking for a media player that can play practically any file type without hassle, SMPlayer is worth trying.
The following tutorial will teach you how to install SMPlayer Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy Jellyfish using a LaunchPAD APT PPA with the command line terminal.
PhotoQt is a simple, open-source image viewer designed to be more than the average image viewer with much more eye candy, highly configurable, and easy to use. PhotoQt is written in Qt, making it a platform-independent software that supports Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows operating systems.
PhotoQt has several features that make it unique among image viewers. First, PhotoQt is highly configurable, allowing users to customize how the program looks and behaves. Second, PhotoQt is very easy to use, with an intuitive interface that makes navigating through images quick and easy. Finally, PhotoQt is extremely fast, making it ideal for viewing extensive image collections and an excellent choice for a simple yet powerful image viewer.
The following tutorial will teach you how to install PhotoQT Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy Jellyfish using a LaunchPAD APT PPA with the command line terminal.
Supposing you have a large file that needs some editing and you are looking for the quickest way of achieving such an objective via a Linux operating system environment, what do you do? If you already have access to your target file and can identify each line number associated with the file content, then your problem is half solved.
This article will walk us through various approaches to inserting a line at a specific line number on an editable file under a Linux operating system.
For SSH to work well, it requires correct permissions on the ~/.ssh or /home/username/.ssh directory: the default location for all user-specific ssh configuration and authentication files. The recommended permissions are read/write/execute for the user, and must not be accessible by group and others.
Besides, ssh also requires that the files within the directory should have read/write permissions for the user, and not be accessible by others. Otherwise, a user might encounter the following error...
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Snap on Manjaro 21. For those of you who didn’t know, Snap is a well-known package manager that packages and deploys various software on Linux-based Operating Systems. Snap is backed by Canonical, the same organization that developed the popular Debian-based Ubuntu Operating System.
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 Snap on a Manjaro 21.
This tutorial shows the installation of an Ubuntu 22.04 base server in detail with many screenshots. The purpose of the guide is to show the base installation of Ubuntu 22.04 LTS that can be used as a basis for our other Ubuntu tutorials here at howtoforge like our perfect server guides.
 The KDE Project currently maintains two stable branches of its popular Plasma desktop environment, the long-term supported Plasma 5.24 LTS and the short-lived 5.25 series, the latter receiving today another batch of bug fixes just a day after the former was updated to Plasma 5.24.6 LTS.
KDE Plasma 5.25.3 is here two weeks after KDE Plasma 5.25.2 with more fixes for the Plasma Wayland session. For example, it addresses a System Settings crash that occurred when changing the screen resolution to a resolution that’s not officially supported by the monitor.
The next Core Update - one of the biggest in size we have ever put together - is released: IPFire 2.27 - Core Update 169. It introduces the support of two-factor authentication (2FA) for OpenVPN clients, updates several core parts of the system, provides mitigations for another two types of CPU side-channel attacks, as well as package updates, bug fixes and other security improvements.
Before we talk in detail about what is new, I would like to ask you for your support. IPFire is a small team of people and like many of our open source friends, we’ve taken a hit this year and would like to ask you to help us out. Please follow the link below where your donation can help fund our continued development: https://www.ipfire.org/donate.
Oracle Linux 9 is out and has some interesting differences from the other Red Hat relatives.
The version was released at the end of June, marking an unusually long gap from Red Hat's announcement of RHEL 9 the month before. For comparison, the beta of AlmaLinux 9 came just three days after RHEL 9's official availability on May 17, and the final version followed within a week.
A similar delay seems to be affecting Rocky Linux as well. Nearly a month after Red Hat's announcement of RHEL 9, the Rocky Linux team tweeted that Rocky 9 was coming soon.
Oracle's release notes reveal an interesting change. Under the heading "Package Changes from the Upstream Release", the second item in the list is btrfs-progs. Given that Red Hat explicitly no longer supports Btrfs in RHEL, this is unexpected.
Oracle supplies a choice of kernels with Oracle Linux, along with documentation on how to switch between them. One is called the "Red Hat Compatibility Kernel" (RHCK) and the other the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel (UEK), which is Oracle's modified build of the kernel. If you need strict RHEL compatibility – the target that AlmaLinux and Rocky Linux provide – then RHCK is identical to the kernel in RHEL, just as CentOS Linux used to be. UEK is something different and, among other things, includes Btrfs support.
Whether just starting out on our professional journey or many years in, we all face hurdles in our careers. When the going gets tough, it can be helpful to have core values and guiding principles to lean back on.
Recently, finalists in the 2022 National CIO of the Year ORBIE Awards each shared a piece of advice they had collected over their careers. We’ve rounded up the 10 best quotes on career development below. Read on, or download the complete quote book for advice on leadership, soft skills, career development, strategy, and more.
IT leadership used to be solely about managing systems. Not anymore. The role of an IT leader today is about getting your teams and your partners to imagine the unimaginable and make it so.
Here are eight characteristics of transformational IT leaders today.
Red Hat and ABB today announced they have allied to drive the adoption of the Red Hat OpenShift platform based on Kubernetes in industrial edge computing environments.
Nick Barcet, senior director for technology strategy within the CTO organization at Red Hat, says this alliance is the latest in what will become a series of partnerships to extend container applications to edge computing platforms that have 2GB of RAM to process data.
Weeks 26–27 (June 27th–July 11th) # We adjusted the way we check the author of the PR for PRs related to dist-git commits that trigger Koji build jobs.
This is the latest in our monthly series summarizing the past month on the Community Blog. Please leave a comment below to let me know what you think.
Tails 5.3 is scheduled for August 9.
Have a look at our roadmap to see where we are heading to.
The Web and design team at Canonical runs two-week iterations building and maintaining all of the Canonical websites and product web interfaces. Here are some of the highlights of our completed work from this iteration.
If you're reading this article from home, you are probably connected with a LTE/5G/DSL/WIFI router. Such devices are usually responsible to route packets between your local devices (smartphone, PC, TV, and so on) and provide access to the world wide web through a built-in modem. Your router at home has most likely a web-based interface for configuration purposes. Such interfaces are often oversimplified as they are made for casual users.
If you want more configuration options, but don't want to spend for a professional device you should take a look at an alternative firmware such as OpenWrt.
Librem 5 runs the fully convergent PureOS, which means you can take your desktop with you within your phone. Its dedicated graphical environment, Phosh, is becoming a popular option for Linux phones. Guido Günther, one of Purism’s main developers, reveals details of Librem’s software development in this interview.
Having a Free Software phone gives you control over your device. You can gain a higher level of privacy protection, and you can finally avoid apps you were stuck with before. It also means you can often keep your device for longer, and protect the environment by reducing e-waste.
When deciding on your switch to a Free Software operating system, your options are installing a new system on your current phone or acquiring a phone with a Free Software operating system pre-installed.
The latter is clearly the easier route, and Purism’s Librem 5 may be the solution for you. By default, it runs PureOS, a Free Software operating system that comes with Phosh, its polished graphical environment. Projects like postmarketOS, Mobian, and Debian have picked up Phosh too, putting it into use on other devices and contributing patches.
Guido Günther is one of the main developers of Phosh (and an FSFE supporter!) and he kindly agreed to tell us about the software, how it fits within the Librem 5 ecosystem, and its advantages.
Elementary is a free open-source Periodic Table of the Elements and element reference app for Android devices that is designed to work on big and small screens like tablets, mobiles and Android TV.
The app is released under the MIT license, and it does not come with any ads, tracker scripts, or in-app purchase.
The app is available to download from the Google Play application store, the F-Droid store, and in the Amazon Appstore.
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The app and source code is released under the MIT License
Happy Friday, everyone --let's review the Apache community's activities from over the past week
The LibreOffice Quality Assurance (QA) Team is happy to announce LibreOffice 7.4 Release Candidate 1 (RC1) is available for testing!
LibreOffice 7.4 will be released as final in mid August, 2022 ( Check the Release Plan for more information ) being LibreOffice 7.4 RC1 the third pre-release since the development of version 7.4 started at the end of November, 2021. Since the previous release, LibreOffice 7.4 Beta1, 280 commits have been submitted to the code repository and 121 issues got fixed. Check the release notes to find the new features included in this version of LibreOffice.
MCU boards, including the $1.5 BluePill board, have been used as cheap logic analyzers for years, notably with Sigrok open-source software. So it should come as no surprise the $4 Raspberry Pi Pico board can also be used as a logic analyzer, with one developer claiming it can deliver 100 Msps, or the performance obtained with a 1.6 GHz CPU, thanks to the PIOs from the Raspberry Pi RP2040.
Hackaday reported about a Sigrok driver for the Pico last March, but the topic was brought to our attention via a post on Hackster.io about an open-source Windows program developed from scratch to transform the Raspberry Pi Pico board into a logic analyzer capable of 100 Msps.
An application written using programming languages like C and C++ requires you to program the destruction of objects in memory when they're no longer needed. The more your application grows, the great the probability that you'll overlook releasing unused objects. This leads to a memory leak and eventually the system memory gets used up, and at some point there's no further memory to allocate. This results in a situation where the application fails with an OutOfMemoryError. But in the case of Java, Garbage Collection (GC) happens automatically during application execution, so it alleviates the task of manual deallocation and possible memory leaks.
Garbage Collection isn't a single task. The Java Virtual Machine (JVM) has eight different kinds of Garbage Collection, and it's useful to understand each one's purpose and strength.
This short tutorial shows how to use if else statements in Bash. An if else statement in programming is a conditional statement that runs a set of statements depending on whether an expression is true or false. This ‘decision making’ capability can be very useful when used in Bash shell scripts, as with any other programming language. In a bash script you will typically see a number of ways in which IF statements are used.
RFC 9116 was written by E. Foudil and Y. Shafranovich and left draft status in April 2022. This RFC formally defines the unofficial security.txt file that has been an unofficial standard for many years, initially created back in 2017 and documented at https://securitytxt.org/.
The security.txt file provides a simple file with a known path that security researchers can look at to locate an endpoint where vulnerabilities can be disclosed without attempting to email random contacts, tweet them, phone the sales number or hunt down their CIO from LinkedIn (all tactics we have used in the past).
This is a positive step and takes virtually zero development time to implement. Every company, whether e-commerce, government, or security provider should have a security.txt file, though from personal experience many don’t.
What is interesting, that 33% of all website creators, decide to not use any CMS at all (static HTML/manually editing it).
there is even a trend of creating cms inside wordperss, “cms inside the cms” so to speak, with plugins such as Enfold, elementor.com and wpastra.com
problem: this also makes wordpress the #1 target for hackers.
The European Union is a legislative superpower with a weak enforcement track record. The latest demonstration of this reality is one of the EU’s flagship laws: the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Four years after the law became applicable, the EU now needs to save the GDPR. So today, we ask the European Commission to introduce a new legislative act to complement the GDPR and clarify its enforcement. Here is why.
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Our takeaway: after four years and thousands of people filing complaints with their data protection authorities, people in the EU are still waiting to see their data protection rights materialise. It appears the road to data protection is paved with delays, uncertainty, and unequal access to remedy across the EU. A new study that we commissioned by The Data Protection Law Scholars Network, The right to lodge a data protection complaint: OK, but then what? An empirical study of current practices under the GDPR, shows that, in practice, data subjects across the EU do not have an equal right to lodge a complaint. This is a serious impediment to the GDPR’s efficacy for vindicating our rights.
Does this mean that it is time for a full legislative reform of the GDPR? To some, this option might seem tempting. The very existence of a “Brussels bubble” depends on the legislative train never stopping. But if the real issue with the GDPR is lack of enforcement, will changes to its content make things any better? It is unlikely. In fact, it may lead to a watering down of hard-fought protections for people’ rights. A recast of the GDPR should be off the table, at least in the near future.
It’s been four years since the European Union’s flagship law, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), went into effect, yet slow enforcement is rendering it nothing more than pixels on a screen. The European Commission must step up and save the GDPR — by introducing a supporting legislative act to bolster its application.
Access Now’s new report, Four year under the GDPR: how to fix its enforcement, unpacks the problems with the application of the law, and lays out concrete recommendations for a solution. Read the snapshot.
“After four years, the law’s impacts are hard to see, not because the law is flawed — it can change the way our data is secured across the continent — but because it continues to be ignored,” said Estelle Massé, Europe Legislative Manager and Global Data Protection Lead at Access Now. “Data Protection Authorities are making efforts to bring the GDPR promises to life but political and legal hurdles are stopping progress. We need the European Commission to create clear and binding rules on enforcement and cooperation and to further empower the European Data Protection Board.”
Red flags over the unequal and slow enforcement of the GDPR have been waving for years. Thousands of people across Europe have filed complaints to their local Data Protection Authorities, but due to slow resolution of cross-border cases and bottlenecks, and differences in national procedural laws, very few of those have even been acknowledged.
The merging of 2D and 3D is a rare artstyle these days. In many cases, the best displays of it were only born out of technological limitations after all. In media where it is used these days, it's mostly for background elements not worth the time and budget to properly animate. I think it carries a certain amount of charm, though. The best example being this old gem I watched recently, Titan A.E. I had heard it was a flop, so I was not expecting much, but I was pleasently surprised.
Apologies in advance, this is going to be a very short, uninformative post; it's more of a public diary entry of sorts for me to put down a couple quick thoughts, and so won't be especially englightening or deep.
I've been applying for jobs since December of 2019. I figure, it being the two year anniversary of unemployment, I'd celebrate by making a diagram and rambling a bit about my experience!
ay mates, lelkins here. it's been a fun gaming journey on void, to be more exact, the glibc version of void. it's my first ever systemd-less distro. it's surprisingly usable for gaming, especially with the fact that they added gamemode in their repository, along with stuff like polymc for you minecraft fellows. i've been on void for, like, a month, i think. just recently came back to arch at around 2022-07-06.
gaming on it can be a little hard if you don't know what you're doing. the general linux gaming stuff like wine and gamemode ARE in the void packages, but they aren't how you expect. the general linux gaming community prefers wine-staging over stable wine, as staging has patches and specific gubbins that make games work better. gamemode is gamemode, but it doesn't work normally to the point of needing to use a different command, as i mentioned in part 1. i will mention how to use gamemode again as it's one of the most important tools of linux gaming. i will use minetest as an example game here.
ay mates, lelkins here! back from the grave! it's been a while, isn't it? sorry for this huge hiatus. my life doesn't have a lot of interesting stuff to put here, as it is basically very normal. like white bread. i did make the tinylog in the hopes of me generating more posts, but even that went dry, forever stuck in the garf zone. i just don't feel very motivated to write on gemini cause, like i said on the first sentence, i just don't have much to write since my life is too normal. not much material. not much going on. i genuinely have no idea what to write here either.
i've been told by my good mate masqq to start 100daystooffload. just write daily about whatever, as long as you have something in there. *write about the things you want to write.*
* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It's like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.
