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Links 20/07/2022: New Elive Beta



  • GNU/Linux

    • Applications

      • Linux LinksBest Free and Open Source Alternatives to Autodesk ReCap - LinuxLinks

        Autodesk, Inc. is an American multinational software company that makes software products and services for the architecture, engineering, construction, product design, manufacturing, media, education, and entertainment industries. It bills itself as a “… leader in 3D design, engineering and entertainment software”.

        The company was founded in 1982 by John Walker, who was a joint developer of the first versions of AutoCAD, the company’s best known software application. Autodesk is listed on the Nasdaq stock exchange, it has over 11,000 employees, and is headquartered in the San Francisco Bay Area.

        While Autodesk develops many high quality applications they are proprietary software. And the vast majority of their products are not available for Linux. This series looks at the best free and open source alternatives.

      • Trend OceansAutojump: An Advanced Way to Navigate Long Path Directories in Linux - TREND OCEANS

        Do you ever get tired of navigating directories back and forth? I am 100% sure that the answer will be yes, and at that point, you will launch multiple windows and operate them all at once.

      • Daniel Stenbergcurl is 8888 days old | daniel.haxx.se

        Today on July 20 2022, curl turns exactly 8888 days old. It was born on March 20, 1998 when curl 4.0 was shipped.

        The number 8 is considered a lucky number in several Asian cultures and I figure we can view this as a prequel to the planned curl version 8 release we intend to ship on curl’s 25th birthday.

    • Instructionals/Technical

    • Desktop Environments/WMs

  • Distributions and Operating Systems

    • Linuxiac3 Most Underrated Linux Distros Deserving More Recognition

      This article will look at the three most underrated Linux distros, focusing on the three main categories: desktop, general-purpose, and server.

      The Linux world has two main characteristics that set it apart from everything else: freedom and the wide variety of Linux distributions. However, the user has so many options and versions of the operating system to choose from that it can sometimes be complicated and confusing.

      This diversity and freedom to choose attracts many supporters to the Linux cause. As a result, some Linux distros get a lot of attention, while others do not.

      Names like Red Hat, Debian, Ubuntu, Arch Linux, and others are well-known outside the Linux community. However, this article will focus on three Linux distributions that we believe are unfairly underrated and do not get the attention and popularity they deserve.

    • Make Use OfWhich Linux Distro Is Best? Manjaro vs. Ubuntu

       Ubuntu and Manjaro are two distros often recommended to Linux beginners. Which one of these two is better overall? Let's find out.

      When you first switch to Linux, there are certain distributions you’re likely to hear about first. Ubuntu has long been one, considering its widespread usage around the world. Many people will recommend starting with Ubuntu and leave it at that.

      But Manjaro is another option you’re increasingly likely to come across. This distro takes Arch Linux (a DIY version of Linux) and turns it into a ready-to-go desktop that’s easy to install and learn. So, why might you consider Manjaro over Ubuntu?

    • Red Hat

      • ZDNetRed Hat's next steps, according to its new CEO and chairman [Ed: Steven Vaughan-Nichols, became stenographer for whoever pays his salary; SJVN is now acting like a PR industry worker]

        In its latest quarter, IBM saw its hybrid-cloud revenue jump 18% to $5.9 billion. Along with this, IBM saw its highest sales growth in a decade. Much of that is due to its stand-alone Red Hat division. True, Red Hat sales increased by "only" 12%, which is low by Red Hat standards but darn good by any other standard. So what will Red Hat do now that it has a new CEO, Matt Hicks, and chairman, Paul Cormier?

      • Fedora MagazaineFedora and Parental Controls - Fedora Magazine

        We all have people around us, whom we hold dear. Some of them might even rely on you to keep them save. And since the world is constantly changing, that can be a challenge. No more is this apparent than with children, and Linux has long been lacking simple tools to help parents. But that is changing, and here we’ll talk about the new parental controls that Fedora Linux provides.

      • Red Hat OfficialA collaborative approach to threat modeling

        At Red Hat, we recognise the importance of implementing security measures early in the software development life cycle (SDLC), as breaches are becoming more evident in today's society. Our work in Red Hat Product Security is to help minimize the software-based risks of enterprise open source from Red Hat , while affording the many benefits that only open source can provide.

      • Red Hat OfficialA hackathon for accessible technologies

        Developing new solutions that make everyday life easier for blind and visually impaired people: That was the goal of the hackathon organised by the Swiss Association for the Blind and Visually Impaired and Red Hat. At the event, blind, visually impaired and sighted technology professionals worked together intensively on various projects — from obstacle detection to automatically determining the expiry date of products in the supermarket.

      • Red Hat OfficialExplore flexible training offerings with Red Hat

        As IT teams around the world strive to keep their applications modern and their processes running smoothly, many organizations are still solidifying what the future of their workplace will look like. The shift toward remote work is no longer isolated to the tech industry and companies of all sizes and domains are making decisions that impact the experience of their employees.

        Whether an organization chooses to welcome employees back in the office, allow full-time remote work, or somewhere in between, it is critical to ensure that your teams have the tools and training that they need to succeed and contribute toward the overall success of your business.

      • Enterprisers ProjectTop 4 skills to be a cloud-native developer

        The rise of cloud-native opens the door to many opportunities for the enterprise but also introduces new challenges. Developers new to cloud-native must navigate the shift from traditional on-premise infrastructure to the cloud. Cloud-native development requires a modern approach to software development, including the ability to develop microservices and leverage serverless functions.

        If one thing is certain for software developers, it is that change will always happen – and with new changes come new skill requirements. Upskilling is essential for developers to manage these changes.

      • Enterprisers Project3 automation trends happening right now

        IT automation has become a broad-based category spanning everything from infrastructure to application development to security to non-IT functions – think Robotic Process Automation (RPA) bots processing invoices in finance or resumes in HR, for example.

        Put another way: Automation is everywhere.

        IT automation specifically continues to grow as a budget priority for CIOs, according to Red Hat’s 2022 Global Tech Outlook. While it’s outranked as a discrete spending category by the likes of security, cloud management, and cloud infrastructure, in reality, automation plays an increasing role in each of those areas.

      • Enterprisers ProjectLessons learned on strategy: 8 CIOs share their most useful tips

        For most challenges businesses face, there's usually more than one solution to explore. Rather than getting bogged down in analysis paralysis, leaders typically rely on tried and true strategy tips and advice to guide them to the next step in the right direction.

    • IBM

      • ATS Group Looks For Patterns In The IT Chaos With Galileo Suite - IT Jungle

        If you’re having trouble keeping track of a busy IT environment, you’re not alone — many organizations are in the same boat as you. But when you check out many observability tools, you’ll often find they don’t even know how to spell “IBM i.” That is not the case with Galileo Suite, a collection of IT monitoring and observability tools from Advanced Technology Service Group that supports a range of operating systems, including IBM i.

        IT Jungle caught sight of Galileo Suite at the recent COMMON POWERUp conference in New Orleans, where the company behind the suite, ATS Group, had a booth in the expo. While ATS Group appears to offer a range of services for IBM i customers, including cloud hosting and modernization and migration offerings, it was Galileo Suite that was the headliner.

      • Service Express Buys iTech Solutions, iInTheCloud - IT Jungle

        It was a “double i” acquisition day recently for Service Express, the IBM business partner that completed acquisitions of iTech Solutions and iInTheCloud on July 5. The moves give Service Express a much bigger presence for IBM i cloud services in the US after it completed a similar deal in the UK.

      • Modernization Starts with the Business, and the Tech Follows - IT Jungle [Ed: "Modernization" as meaningless buzzword touted constantly by IBM to sell complexity]

        Many IBM i shops now find themselves in a situation where it’s time to modernize. Their existing business processes were created to match the environments that existed when the businesses were created. If the companies didn’t gradually adapt to change that occurred over years, they may now find themselves quite far behind, especially with the punctuated equilibrium created by COVID. To paraphrase Hemmingway, the technological debt built up gradually, then suddenly.

      • Four Hundred Monitor, July 20 [Ed: IBM-funded site promoting the lie that IBM is doing well financially ('creative' accounting)]

        We’re always watching for the health of our ecosystem, and one of the easiest indicators on how thing are going is to watch the bottom line. This week, IBM reported a better-than-expected second fiscal quarter 2022 during its financial analyst conference call, and the analysts seem to agree the reasonable, although no one seems to be celebrating too hard as the worry of possibility of weakening IT spending looms in light of unprecedented inflation.

      • IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 24, Number 29

        Please note that we will be moving V7R1M0 from weekly update to archive. Anything new we are informed of that impacts IBM i 7.1, we will post here in the What’s NEW! Section at the top of the story. Also, if you have any IBM i 7.1 requests going forward, we will do our best to provide responses for. Thank you for your readership and support!

    • Debian Family

      • Norbert PreiningEnrico Zini on DAM and "responsability" | There and back again

        The one single person within Debian who has worked for years to get me ostracized and thrown out of Debian is … Enrico Zini. Probably because I made a joke about him and his ridiculous statement “Debian is a relationship between multiple people” (how trivial can you be to be printed on a huge poster?), and me without knowing that his buddy Martina Ferrari is trans, criticizing them for spreading lies. Well … I should have known that doing this to a DAM (and back then also Anti-Harassment-Team member) could bring me into “devil’s kitchen”.

        Funny to see what kind of head-banging creating concoction of talk Zini delivered to DebConf 2022. Obviously, no lesson learned, no reflection on their own failures to act properly. Always putting forth their private animosities over objective reasoning.

        Another confirmation that Debian DAM (and CT) is as far from “data driven decision making” as …

        Best greetings, one of your “troublesome people”

      • Deconstruction of the DAM hat

        distinguish DAM decisions from decisions that are more about vision and direction, and would require more representation

      • Linux MagazineElive Has Released a New Beta

        Elive is one of the lesser-known Linux distributions but holds a special place in my heart because it uses the Enlightenment desktop. For years, Enlightenment was my default because it was one of the more unique and highly configurable desktops on the market. These days, very few distributions offer Enlightenment, so when Elive offers a new release, I pay attention.

        This time around, the team has shifted to Debian Bullseye as their base. Bullseye was only recently released (July 9th, 2022), so it's fairly remarkable that the Elive team was able to make the switch so quickly and seamlessly.

    • Devices/Embedded

      • CNX SoftwareRock 5B RK3588 SBC preview - What works, what doesn’t in Debian 11

         I’ve recently received an early sample of Radxa ROCK5 Model B (aka ROCK 5B) SBC part of the “Developer Edition” batch with 16GB RAM, and already showed the hardware and it booting successfully in Debian 11.

        I’ve now spent more time with the board, and as part of the “debug party” tested performance and features in Debian 11. As one would expect, some things work OK, but others still need improvement.

    • Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

  • Gemini* and Gopher

    • Personal

      • SpellBinding: IUMORTL Wordo: SAWED
      • Professional Goal



        My wife and I had a conversation about what each of us really wanted to do with our lives. What are we passionate about? What roles do we see ourselves playing in the world? Are we interested in doing one thing for the entirety of our professional lives, or are there several things we want to do?

        I think about and struggle with these question a lot, largely because I don't know what I want to do professionally. There doesn't seem to be any one topic or pursuit that so inspires me as to want to engage in it permanently. What I imagined doing as a career when I was six is not the same as what I imagined doing as a career when I was twelve. Ditto when I was sixteen, twenty, twenty-five, and today at thirty.

      • Future Writing Topics

        I am very fortunate to have a monumental amount of curiosity about the natural world and the *why's* of things, a casual interest in entertaining/thought provoking stories, and a desire to communicate the most challenging of abstract concepts the universe has to offer, to normal people in easy-to-understand vocabulary. My desires to learn, understand, and communicate, blend perfectly into a wellspring of writing inspiration (even if few of my potential readers are as interested in the topics as myself).

        [...]

        Also notice that I try not fall into the trap of trying to stay on topic or have a global theme/motif across my stuff. There are definitely topical themes of math, science philosophy, theology, education, and abstraction across my writings. However there is no real consitency article to article, one day you can have a cooking recipe, the next a tangent on the nature of turbulence. Maybe anthological diversity is its own kind of theme.

    • Technical

      • Towards a BBS server



        So, I've made myself a gopher, spartan and gemini server. What next? I know, a BBS server.

        I figured that with a BBS I'd get more interactivity, assuming anyone logs onto it. It's amazing what people have been able to do with Amigas, C64s, and even the humble ZX Spectrum.

        I'll be using a Raspberry Pi for my server. What with the price of electricity these days it's a good choice. I'll be sticking with FreeBSD. I'm new to FreeBSD, but I think it's a good system. I like to think of it as "Slackware done right". Sorry, Slackers.

      • Internet/Gemini

        • How to account systemd services bandwidth usage on NixOS



          Did you ever wonder how many bytes a system service is daily receiving from the network? Thanks to systemd, we can easily account this.

          This guide targets NixOS, but the idea could be applied on any Linux system using systemd.

        • Gridmapper CL

          I've been working on a Gridmapper edition that doesn't require a browser to run. Now I have a version that needs a Common Lisp to build (I've been using SBCL), plus SDL and Cairo.


* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It's like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.



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