This week we had lots of great news, starting with the release of the Linux Mint 21 beta operating system and Lubuntu's new Backports PPA to get the latest LXQt desktop releases, and continuing with lots of goodies for both KDE Plasma and GNOME desktop users, as well as some goodies for Linux gamers.
On the hardware side of things, System76 launched their Launch Lite configurable keyboard and TUXEDO Computers announced Linux support for their external water cooling system for Linux laptops. On top of that, I give you the heads up on Ubuntu 21.10's end of life and the SCaLE 19x conference in late July.
We try and bust a common Linux distro myth. Then what surprised Chris about his new Steam Deck.
Josh and Kurt talk about PyPI mandating two factor authentication for the top 1% of projects. It feels like a simple idea, but it’s not when you start to think about it. What problems does 2FA solve? How common are these attacks? What are the second and third order effects of mandating 2FA? This episode should have something for everyone on all sides of this discussion to violently disagree with.
**kdev-php** , **kdev-python** , **the kdevelop IDE** , **kdewebkit** , **kdf** , **kdiagram** , **kdialog** from Slackware set **kde**.
Where should tech builders draw the line on AI for military or surveillance? Just because it can be built, doesn’t mean it should be. At what point do we blow the whistle, call out the boss, and tell the world? Find out what it’s like to sound the alarm from inside a big tech company.
Laura Nolan shares the story behind her decision to leave Google in 2018 over their involvement in Project Maven, a Pentagon project which used AI by Google.
Yves Moreau explains why he is calling on academic journals and international publishers to retract papers that use facial recognition and DNA profiling of minority groups.
The 5.19-rc7 kernel prepatch is out for testing.
Linux kernel developers have addressed the Retbleed speculative execution bug in older Intel and AMD silicon, but the fix wasn't straightforward, so emperor penguin Linus Torvalds has delayed delivery of the next version by a week.
"When we've had one of those embargoed [hardware] issues pending, the patches didn't get the open development, and then as a result missed all the usual sanity checking by all the automation build and test infrastructure we have," Torvalds wrote in a post announcing the delivery of release candidate seven for version 5.19 of the kernel.
"So no surprise – there's been various small fixup patches afterwards too for some corner cases."
Retbleed is not the only reason for the delay.
If you’re an Apple Music subscriber wanting to use the service on Linux, you have to check out Cider.
Cider (inspired name, eh?) is an “open-source, community-oriented Apple Music client” for Windows, macOS (not that they need it), and Linux. It is Electron-based but the developers behind it say it was written ‘from scratch with performance in mind’.
As well as letting you browse songs, artists, and albums in the Apple Music catalog the app also gives you access to Apple Podcasts too.
 There are many things to admire about Apple’s hardware and software. Apple make great looking (albeit expensive) hardware. Over the years key successes include the iPhone, iPad, iPod, and the MacBook Air. The company designs its own hardware and software. This gives them the power to make an operating system and suite of apps that are tailor-made and optimized for their hardware. Apple also operates the Apple Music and Apple TV media distribution platforms.
Mac OS X is Apple’s proprietary operating system for its line of Macintosh computers. Its interface, known as Aqua, is highly polished and built on top of a BSD derivative (Darwin). There’s a whole raft of proprietary applications that are developed by Apple for their operating software. This software is not available for Linux and there’s no prospect of that position changing.
An ISO image or .iso (International Organization for Standardization) file is an archive file that contains a disk image called ISO 9660 file system format.
Every ISO file has .iso an extension has a defined format name taken from the ISO 9660 file system and is specially used with CD/DVD ROMs. In simple words, an iso file is a disk image.
In our earlier articles on this blog, we used the Wine program to install and run windows based applications on Debian-based and and other Red Hat-based Linux distributions.
There is another open source software available called PlayOnLinux that uses Wine as its base and gives feature-rich functions and a user-friendly interface to install and run windows applications on Linux.
The Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) provides a centralized and automated method for configuring the network attributes of hosts when they connect to the network. The DHCP server assigns IP addresses to hosts, along with configuration information such as DNS servers, the domain name used for DNS searches, the default gateway, an NTP (Network Time Protocol) server, a server from which a network boot can be performed if necessary, and more. DHCP eliminates the need to configure each network host individually.
DHCP is also useful for configuring laptops, mobile phones, tablets, and other devices which might connect as unknown guests. This configuration is typical for WiFi access in public places. However, DHCP offers even more advantages when used in a closed, private network to manage static IP address assignments for known hosts using the central DHCP database.
The DHCP server uses a database of information created by the sysadmin. This database is entirely contained in the /etc/dhcp/dhcpd.conf configuration file. DHCPD stands for DHCP Daemon, which is the background server process. Like all well-designed Linux configuration files, it is a simple ASCII plain text file. This structure means that it is open and knowable. It can be examined by standard, simple text manipulation tools like cat and grep, and be modified by any text editor such as EMACS or Vim, or a stream editor such as sed.
This article demonstrates creating a base API with Express and JavaScript. Express is a NodeJS minimalist web framework. This combination allows for minimal effort to get an API up and running at the speed of light. If you have six minutes of free time, you can get this API working to do something useful.
Netfilter tables (nftables) is the default firewall shipped with modern Linux distros. It's available on Fedora and RHEL 8, the latest Debian, and many others. It replaces the older iptables that was bundled in earlier distro releases. It's a powerful and worthy replacement for iptables, and as someone who uses it extensively, I appreciate its power and functionality.
One of the features of nftables is the ability to add counters to many elements, such as rules. These are enabled on demand. You need to explicitly ask for it on a per line basis using the "counter" argument. I have them enabled for specific rules in my firewall, which gives me visibility into those rules.
This got me thinking. How can I look at these counters in real time? At first I tried "watch" which allows things like refresh rate, but I didn't like the default format and it wasn't scrollable. I found using head and tail and awk less than ideal. A user-friendly solution didn't exist. So I wrote my own, which I'd like to share with the open source community.
Exposure to the Linux operating system ecosystem introduces its users to an in-depth understanding of Linux process management footprints. By definition, a process is a program that is continually executing.
A program that is not executing does not qualify as a process since it is a passive entity. Its executing state makes it an active entity hence a process. It is also worth mentioning that a single program in execution can be associated with multiple processes.
Comparing directories in Linux might seem like a light and dismissive task for a user just starting to explore the milestones associated with using Linux as a primary operating system.
Directory comparison is everything for matured users who have thoroughly explored the Linux file management spectrum. For instance, you might have two directories that are very similar in terms of the content stored in them.
In this case, you might want to get rid of one of these directories but you are unsure if they are perfect duplicates. Such a scenario calls for the Linux directory comparison expertise.
If you want to use an operating system that is close to RedHat, then Fedora should be on top of your list because it has the same package manager that RedHat does use, and apart from that, you will get the same experience.
So let’s see how you can install Fedora 36 on your VirtualBox with the following steps, and after that, you can enhance your skills with an enterprise-grade OS.
In this guide, we will cover how to install Rocky Linux 9 step by step with screenshots.
Rocky Enterprise Software Foundation has released its latest operating system ‘Rocky Linux 9’. Rocky Linux is free and open-source operating system for workstation and servers. It is considered as drop-in replacement for CentOS Linux.
‘Blue Onyx’ is the Code name for Rocky Linux 9, it is the clone of RHEL 9. The main difference between Rocky Linux and RHEL is that it has its own open-source build system called ‘Peridot’.
As a starter, you might think that Ba(sh) is the only shell available to use in UNIX-like distributions, but that’s not the case in modern Linux distributions.
There are several other shell interpreters available to help you out, like KornShell (ksh), C shell (csh), Z shell (zsh), and fish. From this list, you can use the zsh shell, which is highly customizable with more than 100+ themes and plugins that can help you to perform your work swiftly with an aesthetic look.
Z Shell, or zsh, is a shell interpreter that inherits features from bash, ksh, and tcsh, which can be used as an interactive shell, utilities, and basic programming language functionality.
SSH or Secure Shell is an invaluable utility when it comes to undertaking remote login objectives on remote machines. For Linux users, the SSH utility offers more than just remote login solutions.
The mentioned users are also able to effortlessly accomplish Linux administrative tasks. Regardless of whether the targeted remote machine is untrustworthy or whether the network that facilitates the communication between the two machines is insecure, SSH ensures that these communications are secure and encrypted.
It is sometimes frustrating when an SSH session ends too soon while we are multitasking on the Linux terminal environment. Finding a way of keeping the SSH session alive for as long as possible can be a game changer for Linux users who don’t want to keep on re-initiating new SSH sessions.
A Linux operating system provides the perfect environmental exposure for users to understand the Ins and Outs of process management. The simplest definition of a process is any program in execution (running).
For instance, the web browser you are using to read this article piece only becomes a process once that web browser is up and running. Before your web browser was installed and launched, it only existed as a program (a process in waiting).
When you dive deeper into the concept of process management, you will get to acknowledge the various properties associated with processes. This article will walk us through differentiating three processes’ properties namely: PID, TID, and PPID.
As more developers work to optimize their games for the Steam Deck, a bunch of Native Linux games release and Valve continue improving Proton - the Steam Deck continues to see more games go through Deck Verified and there's now over 4,000 listed officially.
Puppy Linux has offered a minimal and portable Linux system for almost 20 years, making it not only one of the oldest continuous Linux distros, but a legend among anyone who ever used a desktop in a hotel business center. Insert a USB with Puppy on it, answer e-mail, print a boarding pass, and never once worry about malware, spyware, or navigating Internet Explorer.
Puppy impresario Barry Kauler started development on EasyOS in 2017. The goal was to take what he had with Puppy and Puppy successor Quirky and turn it into a cutting-edge, but still minimal, Linux distro. Hence, EasyOS runs off a USB stick, takes up only 641MB and needs just 2GB of memory (though 8GB is recommended). The Linux kernel (currently, the 5.15 series) loads into RAM at the first boot. Then it can save itself to the USB at the end of the session. In addition, EasyOS uses some of Linux's most modern technology, including containers, and its EasyShare app makes finding network printers and shares almost impossibly simple.
In this, EasyOS is fast, efficient, effective, and impressive. And, if the desktop is a bit unsightly - "retro," says Kauler - it doesn't get in the way of the work. (Yes, we're talking about you, GNOME.)
Still, know that EasyOS - to be polite - has its idiosyncrasies. I downloaded EasyOS Dunfell 4.1 for this review in the middle of June; two weeks later, the OS had been updated at least three times, and the update mechanism was broken in the process. In addition, the download comes as an IMG file and not an ISO, and Kauler is adamant about that difference. Finally, EasyOS is a work in progress, and not everything always happens as it is supposed to happen. As such, it's not for everyone, as well-intentioned as it is.
Of course it features the small "difference file" update, by clicking on the "update" icon on the desktop. By sure to have the current image file, for example easy-4.2.1-amd64.img', at /mnt/wkg (/mnt/${WKG_DEV}/${WKG_DIR}), so that a small difference-file may be downloaded and merged with it, to create 'easy-4.2.7-amd64.img'.
We are finalizing the branding for the installers. Thank you so much for letting us tag your logo in our spin. It will be a water mark for slides during the install (calamares). As soon as I get a final I will post a screen here of the installer.
DEBIX Model A is a single board computer powered by an NXP i.MX 8M Plus quad-core Cortex-A53 processor with a 2.3 TOPS AI accelerator in a form factor that combines Raspberry Pi 4 and 3 Model B designs.
The SBC comes with up to 6GB RAM, a microSD card slot, an optional eMMC flash of up to 128GB capacity, HDMI 2.0a, LVDS, and MIPI DSI display interfaces, a MIPI CSI camera interface, Gigabit Ethernet and WiFi 5 connectivity, plus a 40-pin GPIO expansion header.
The ICE-V Wireless from QWERTY Embedded Design is a tiny board that combines a Lattice iCE40 UltraPlus FPGA and a ESP32-C3-MINI-1 Wi-Fi/BLE module from Espressif Systems. This device supports popular programming platforms such as Arduino and MicroPython for easy software development.
The FPGA featured on this board is the low-cost ICE40UP5K-SG48 from Lattice Semi which provides up to 120 Kbits of EBR RAM, 1024 Kbits of SPRAM and 5280 LUTs. According to Lattice, this FPGA has been optimized for Machine Learning and AI implementations.
Decades ago, I was sent to Taiwan and met a colleague there to install a computer system in a silicon wafer manufacturing facility and provide necessary training to the staff. I took a cab from the airport to my hotel in Taipei and recall marveling at the extraordinarily generous freeways that served surprisingly light traffic flows. In many places, six to eight lanes stretched for miles in both directions supporting traffic that could have been accommodated by no more than two.
I became curious and finally asked my driver if he knew why the roadways were so incongruously wide? It was, he explained, a precaution against a preemptive Chinese invasion. “If they bomb our military airfields,” he explained, “our pilots will have somewhere to land.”
The Kingdom of Thailand is a constitutional monarchy with a parliamentary-style government divided into executive, legislative, and judiciary branches. The country has been beset by intense political conflict since 2005, during the government of former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra. Corruption allegations against the regime culminated in a military coup on September 19, 2006 that ousted Thaksin. The military launched another coup on May 22, 2014 and seized power following mass protests against the civilian government led by Thaksin’s sister, Yingluck Shinawatra. The junta claimed that the 2014 coup was needed to restore order and called itself the National Council for Peace and Order (NCPO).
A court in Colombia has banned Apple from selling 5G iPhones and iPads in the country due to the infringement of a patent owned by Swedish telecom giant Ericsson.
The affected devices are iPhone 12 and 13 models and also the newer iPads.
The court order, issued in the first week of July, concerned a patent issued to Ericsson in 2019 and valid until the end of 2037, according to the FOSS Patents blog which is published by long-time IP activist Florian Mueller.
Apple's infringement of the patent was determined in April and the following month Ericsson posted a bond of US$50,000 (A$73,496), a prerequisite for enforcement.
After targeting cheat sellers, game developer Bungie has now sued a US-based gamer who uses cheats. At least initially, Bungie believed it was dealing with just another ban-evading cheater but the investigation into Twitch-streamer 'MiffysWorld' turned up a lot more. As it turns out, expressing a desire to burn down Bungie's offices wasn't the worst thing discovered.
Piracy is a controversial topic and research into the effects of copyright infringement is widely debated as well. A new academic study adds an interesting angle by suggesting that software piracy might lower poverty. While this is a plausible conclusion, there could actually be more factors at play.
Alexis' ownership of X is based on ongoing mutual informed consent, in the context of Risk-Aware Consensual Kink. Nothing in this Title Deed should be interpreted otherwise.
I feel too much, sometimes. Right now my wife and I are both away from home, and while I know our cat is well-cared-for, she misses us and she doesn't know why we're gone. I just wish I could explain it to her.
I was visiting a friend down south many years ago. I believe I was still in upper secondary school (high school, basically) so it must have been sometime 2001-2004.
My friend and I went to a city nearby. It was before lunch. Soon after getting there we saw a very inebriated miss a step as he was about to cross a road. His foot came over the edge of the pavement without him being ready for it and he fell head first on the asphalt. Although he got up by himself we felt that a fall that hard may have consequences.
We went over to see how he was doing. Of course with him being under the influence it was hard to tell. The safest thing seemed to be to have medical personnel have a look. We must have left our phones at home because I remember that we to a hotel. Maybe it was the one he was staying at. We sat down in the lobby together.
They say speech is acceptable When it fits into norms They say it's reprehensible If it strays in its forms
They want us to believe their lies That truth always prevails We all should simply close our eyes Ignoring all details
The US is not ok, and it hasn't been for a long, long time. Given its history, it has never been ok. But this is different. Now it is fracturing, and the seismic disturbances continue a-pace.
[...]
Two years ago, I lived through a coup in Sri Lanka. It was stupid. The minority party threw chili powder at everyone in Parliament and took over by farce. Math, however, requires a majority and the courts kicked them out. They gave in. We'd been protesting for weeks and yay, we won.
No.
I didn't know it at the time, but we had already lost. No one knew -- but oh my God, what we lost. The legitimate government came back but it was divided and weak. We were divided and weak. We were vulnerable.
Four months later, on Easter Sunday, some assholes attacked multiple churches and hotels, killing 269 of us. My wife and kids were at church, I had to frantically call them back. Our nation was shattered. Mobs began attacking innocent Muslims. It was out of control. The coup broke our government, and four months later, that broke us.
I grew up in your typical midwestern US household. My father worked for 30+ years in a factory and my mom was stay at home until I (being the youngest child) was old enough to not need constant supervision. I was taught all of my life about the value of hard work. As such, for much of my life I very much subscribed to the idea that the world doesn't owe you anything; that everything you get should be something that you worked for. This is a very difficult notion to get rid of. It's only now, as I settle into middle age, that I'm seeing another truth. That truth is that long before I was born, all of the valuable land was already carved up amongst the wealthy. All of the resources are spoken for, by and large. In fact, our society is borrowing against our future generations' resources and potential. In short, we were all bought and sold down the river from day one. So yeah, maybe we're owed something for that.
I've been playing it the past week and it's the most fun I've had with OOT. I've started OOT over multiple times over the years through emulators and various Nintendo releases, but this might be the time I actually finish it.
The best feature is the frame interpolation which lets you play far beyond the game's native frame rate of 20 or so. It's almost perfect and makes the game feel like it's actually running at a higher frame rate despite the extra frames only being interpolated. The controls even feel more responsive and everything just feels tighter, which is nice even if it's placebo.
Preface: I'm not in the hobby - I just like to ooh and ahh over pretty arrangements of keycaps and cases.
I subscribe to the mystique of the HHKB. Despite the humorous saddle metaphor, the HHKB is a utilitarian workhorse. It is not without its many detractors who think it's a 60% toy nevertheless.
Whenever I hear someone boast about their 100+ wpm prowess with Qwerty, I cringe because even if they're really good with it an inferior layout has worked its way into their muscle memory.
[...]
I think the standard mouse is harmful excepting trackballs (often placed in the middle between two keyboard halves). That being said, I think a one-handed keyboard and mousing with the other hand makes a lot of sense. I didn't forget about trackpads and pointing sticks, but that's a story for another day.
Keyboards still have a lot of room to become more personalized. What do I mean by that? For example, the Esrille Nisse comes in two sizes to accommodate for Japanese people's smaller hands. The keycaps on the Medium model are milled to be thinner from regular keycaps. There should be some sort of program to figure out from people's hands and a heat map of how they type what keyboard is best for them. From there, it's off to the text editor races.
I installed FreshRSS last night (it wasn't entirely straightforward for someone who hasn't dealt with php installs in ages) and I gotta say it already blows Feedly out of the water.
Feedly was great when I started using it a bunch of years ago. It's been the only feed reader I've used and it really changed how I interact with a lot of websites. But feedly has constantly gotten worse over the years in an attempt to be more feature-full.
[...]
None of these are really big changes in and of themselves, but they do clutter up the interface a bit and especially the first two are truly annoying to me. What I dislike the most I guess is the general trend towards a heavier and slower website made so by features that aren't for me.
FreshRSS let's me just read my feeds. I installed it on my Raspberry Pi 2B, where I host this website and capsule along with thelounge.chat and Antenna (by far my most used service). Despite the low powered and much utilised server the FreshRSS interface is a lot faster than Feedly. And I really do mean a lot.
* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It's like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.
