A huge number of modern companies know about Linux firsthand. Many of them have been using various distributions in one form or another for many years. It is a large family of open-source operating systems running on a single core. Initially, users used it on their computers, and for many years large companies have been using it to work with servers. Most companies using Linux are large IT organizations.
Many people wonder why large companies use it. What are its benefits? Maybe Linux is suitable not only for large companies but also for small and medium businesses.
Linux is really of interest not only for large IT companies but also for small and medium-sized businesses. We will cover the top benefits of using this operating system and explain why you should use it.
Switching to a new operating system is a whole different experience. As the interface and features change, it can take some time to explore and understand the new environment you are working in.
Linux is more of a command line-based OS as compared to Windows and macOS, which rely mostly on their graphical user interfaces or GUI. This is one of the reasons why new Linux users often find it confusing and make some beginner mistakes that ultimately dampen their experience.
To get the most out of your new Linux device, here are 10 mistakes you should avoid as a first-time Linux user.
If you look around Google's Mountain View, CA offices, you'll see Windows machines, Chromebooks, Macs — and gLinux desktops. G what, you ask? Well, in addition to relying on Linux for its servers, Google has its very own Linux desktop distribution.
You can't get it — darn it! — but for more than a decade, Google has been baking and eating its own homemade Linux desktop distribution. The first version was Goobuntu. (As you'd guess from the name, it was based on Ubuntu.)
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To make all this work without a lot of blood, sweat, and tears, Google created a new workflow system, Sieve. Whenever Sieve spots a new version of a Debian package, it starts a new build. These packages are built in package groups since separate packages often must be upgraded together. Once the whole group has been built, Google runs a virtualized test suite to ensure no core components and developer workflows are broken. Next, each group is tested separately with a full system installation, boot, and local test suite run. The package builds complete within minutes, but testing can take up to an hour.
Once that's done, all the new packages are merged with the newest gLinux package pool. Then, when Google decides it's time to release it into production, the team snapshots that pool. Finally, it rolls out the fresh release to the fleet. Of course, it’s not going to just dump it on users. Instead, it uses Site reliability engineering (SRE) principles such as incremental canarying to make sure nothing goes awry.
If the real CDE is too much hard work for you or for your computer, there's a new version of the Not So Common Desktop Environment.
Very nearly a decade ago, we reported that the official Common Desktop Environment had been made open source. In its day, CDE was pretty much the unified desktop environment for commercial Unix OSes: it ran on almost every proprietary Unix and Unix-like OS there was, from IBM AIX to DEC's Tru64, even on DEC's OpenVMS.
It is not uncommon for users to want to run a program targeted to one operating system on another type of system. With the increasing prevalence of smartphones, Android has become the world's most widely used operating system. So users may want to run Android apps on Linux systems in order to get access to a game or other app that is not available in a Linux version or to develop mobile apps on their desktop system. The Waydroid project provides a way to run those apps on Linux, which means they can run on a variety of devices, including Linux-based smartphones like the PinePhone.
Waydroid is similar in concept to the Windows compatibility layer Wine. The fact that Android runs on the Linux kernel makes properly running Android apps on other Linux systems much simpler than doing so for Windows software. It is not possible to simply run Android apps directly on a regular Linux operating system, though, because they depend on a different user-space environment. However, by using kernel features such as namespaces, it is possible to run the entire Android user space in a container on a Linux system. This is the technique used by Waydroid; it runs a complete Android system in a container in much the same way that it is possible to, for example, run Debian in a container on Fedora. That allows Waydroid to have better performance than it would have running in a virtual machine or an emulator.
Linux users can get in on some of the laptop deals taking place right now, as Lenovo has discounted its popular ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 9 laptop, and this model includes Linux. Right now you can purchase the laptop for just $1,238, which is a massive savings of nearly $1,100, as it regularly costs $2,336. You’ll need to use the eCoupon code THINKCTODEAL1 at checkout, and businesses, students, and teachers are eligible to save up to an extra 5% as well. If you’d like to expand your screen real estate with this impressive laptop, you can browse some of the desktop monitor deals taking place alongside it.
IVM Development Group is pleased to announce the release of pg_ivm 1.2.
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pg_ivm is an extension module that provides Incremental View Maintenance (IVM) feature.
Incremental View Maintenance (IVM) is a way to make materialized views up-to-date in which only incremental changes are computed and applied on views rather than recomputing. pg_ivm provides a kind of immediate maintenance, in which materialized views are updated immediately after a base table is modified.
Traditionally, system administrators have been responsible for designing, implementing, and managing hardware and underlying operating systems. However, advances in edge computing, machine learning (ML), and intelligent applications have broadened sysadmins' scope of work and skillset required for software development projects.
Unless your application is entirely stateless, it will need to store and retrieve persistent data. This is where databases come in — they employ a simple query language that allows authorized users to retrieve and edit data. And now that inroads have been made to enable stateful Kubernetes deployments, many organizations are looking to bring the same scalability advantages of containerization and Kubernetes to database management.
Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) is home to a wide variety of helpful open source projects. These tools span everything from cloud native networking, to continuous integration, scheduling and orchestration and many other areas. Below, we’ll review three CNCF projects that can be used to support cloud-native databases. These tools specifically help scale the management of distributed databases in the cloud.
Google recently announced the general availability of Rocky Linux optimized for Google Cloud. The new images are customized variants of Rocky Linux, the open-source enterprise distribution compatible with Red Hat Enterprise.
Developed in collaboration with CIQ, the support and services partner of Rocky Linux, the new images are a direct replacement for CentOS workloads. Started by Gregory Kurtzer, the founder of the CentOS project and CEO of CIQ, Rocky Linux is a downstream, binary-compatible release built using the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) source code. The distribution was born after Red Hat decided not to provide full updates and maintenance updates for CentOS 8 as initially announced.
Apache continues to hold on to the top spot in the market share of the top million busiest sites with 22.33%, with nginx in close second at 21.55%. Both however have seen decreases in market share of 0.22pp and 0.1pp respectively, with Cloudflare increasing by 0.08pp to 20.26%. If this trend continues, we should expect to see Cloudflare overtake its rivals within the next year.
My name is Dominhique Dumont, DevOps freelance in Grenoble, France.
My goal is to share my experience regarding a production issue that occurred last week where my client complained that the applications was very slow and sometime showed 5xx errors. The production service is hosted on a Kubernetes cluster on Azure and use a MongoDB on ScaleGrid.
I reproduced the issue on my side and found that the API calls were randomly failing due to timeouts on server side.
The server logs were showing some MongoDB disconnections and reconnections and some time-out on MongoDB connections, but did not give any clue on why some connections to MongoDB server were failing.
Debugging Lisp in Deep Space, 0 Dependency Websites with OpenBSD & AsciiDoc, Deleting old snapshots on FreeBSD, Full multiprocess support in lldb-server, Basic fix between pf tables and macros, and more
Joel and the orville.
Time to check out the most recommended lightweight Linux distro from the audience - antiX! Color me surprised.
Do you still place icons on your desktop? If so, stop! This isn't 1990. Desktop icons are a paradigm of the very distant past that no longer make sense on modern operating systems and modern desktop environments.
Hello and welcome to the 476th installment of Linux in the Ham Shack. In this deep dive episode, the hosts interview Torsten Clay, N4OGW, the author of so2sdr, a software application for doing single-op, multi-radio contesting. The program allows for logging, rig control, station mapping on a band plot and much more. Thank you for listening to this episode. We hope you find it informative and enjoyable. Have a great week.
Sometimes big corporations don't care if small FOSS projects make fan projects, other times there attention will be grabbed as is the case with the Notkia project which recieved a threatening email from the Nokia corporation.
The BPF subsystem allows programmers to write programs that can run safely in kernel space. All memory accesses and function calls in BPF programs are statically checked for safety using the in-kernel verifier, which analyzes programs in their entirety before allowing them to be loaded. While this allows the kernel to safely run BPF programs, it heavily restricts what those programs are able to do. Among these constraints is a rule that programs cannot store pointers into BPF maps for use (such as dereferencing them or passing them to the kernel in kfunc and BPF helper invocations) at a later time. A patch set by Kumar Kartikeya Dwivedi adds this capability to BPF.
A page-table entry (PTE) is relatively small, requiring just eight bytes to refer to a 4096-byte page on most systems. It thus does not seem like a worrisome level of overhead, and little effort has been made over the kernel's history to reduce page-table memory consumption. Those eight bytes can hurt, though, if they are replicated across a sufficiently large set of processes. The msharefs patch set from Khalid Aziz is a revised attempt to address that problem, but it is proving to be a hard sell in the memory-management community.
One of the defining characteristics of a process on Linux (or most other operating systems) is a distinct address space. As a result, the page tables that manage the state of that address space are private to each process (though threads within a process will share page tables). So if two processes have mappings to the same page in physical memory, each will have an independent page-table entry for that page. The overhead for PTEs, thus, increases linearly with the number of processes mapping each page.
One of the key selling points of the BPF subsystem is that loading a BPF program is safe: the BPF verifier ensures that the program cannot hurt the kernel before allowing the load to occur. That guarantee is perhaps losing some of its force as more capabilities are made available to BPF programs but, even so, it may be a bit surprising to see this proposal from Artem Savkov adding a BPF helper that is explicitly designed to crash the system. If this patch set is merged in something resembling its current form, it will be the harbinger of a new era where BPF programs are, in some situations at least, allowed to be overtly destructive.
As Savkov notes, one of the major use cases for BPF is kernel debugging, a task which is also often helped by the existence of a well-timed crash dump. By making the kernel's panic() function available to BPF programs, Savkov is trying to combine the two by allowing a BPF program to cause a crash — and create a crash dump — when it detects the conditions that indicate a problem that a developer is looking for. Savkov is seemingly not the only one wanting this capability; Jiri Olsa noted that he has gotten a request for this feature as well.
Making panic() available to BPF has some obvious hazards, so one would expect that there would be some guard rails put into place. In this case, the first step is a new flag, BPF_F_DESTRUCTIVE, that must be provided when a program that will invoke destructive operations (such as a panic() call) is loaded. If this flag is not present, the BPF verifier will reject the loading of a program that contains calls to any destructive helper functions, of which panic() is the only one (so far).
Even then, the panic() helper function is only available to tracing programs. It makes little sense, after all, for an infrared decoder to be able to panic the system, though this restriction will prevent a complete implementation in BPF for remote controls featuring a "panic" button. Then, there is a new sysctl knob (kernel.destructive_bpf_enabled) that must be set to a non-zero value; otherwise the panic() call will not be allowed. Even when the sysctl knob has been set, the process on whose behalf the BPF program is running must have the CAP_SYS_BOOT capability.
Intel has been preparing Idle driver support for the company's next-gen Xeon CPUs, codenamed "Sapphire Rapids", over the last five months. Michael Larabel of Phoronix notes that there is still a limitation within the upcoming Intel Scalable CPUs. The processor power state handling is mutually exclusive; specifically, core C-states (C-states) C1 and C1E, or "C1 Enhanced". The company has been unable to activate both C-states simultaneously, but with the current firmware update published by Intel, it appears a fix has been manufactured.
Leave it to AMD to continue to add some last-minute coding before the merge window for Linux 5.20 opening next week, reports Michael Larabel of the website Phoronix. Typically, cutoffs for any feature work placed into the DRM-Next queue for each Linux kernel cycle ends near the "-rc6" point of the cycle. The closing window has yet to stop AMD from attempting to ensure any finalizing of drivers for the upcoming Linux 5.20 kernel for their upcoming RDNA 3 graphics architecture.
Undoubtedly, Notepad Next is an amazing alternative to Notepad++ for Linux users. Notepad Next stands out with a similar interface to Notepad++ and cross-platform support. However, we all know Notepad++ as a popular source code editor for Windows users. It gradually becomes the best alternative to Notepad for Windows because it has more features. Alas! Notepad++ is not available for Linux enthusiasts.
Though a Snap package of Notepad++ is available for Linux users, it’s not up to the mark. Therefore, I discovered something that tries to provide a refined version of Notepad++ for Linux users. Yes, I’m talking about Notepad Next.
Simply Put, for Linux users, Notepad Next is trying to re-implement the features that Snap package Notepad++ offers along with a similar-looking interface. Isn’t it interesting? Let’s dig it deep with me.
EasyOCR is a free developer-friendly OCR "Optical Character Recognition" that supports 80+ languages including Latin, Chinese, Arabic, and Cyrillic.
EasyOCR is written in the Python programming language. It can be installed as a Python package, and integrates well with other Python Frameworks like Django, Flask, and others.
If you are facing a problem “Cannot initiate the connection to in.archive.ubuntu.com:80” error while performing the system update or installing some application then here is the solution.
Linux can make new users a little annoying when some warning or error appears, however, resolving errors is the best way to get one step closer to becoming an experienced Linux user. However, coming to the point, i.e how to solve this error.
Such an error appears when the default repository servers are not reachable by our system. In such a case, we can switch to the main servers of Ubuntu to download and install the required packages on our system.
The purpose of this article is to demonstrate how to connect to a single-board-computer like RaspberryPi, Rock64, or more generally a system with a Linux OS. This connection via SSH allows the user to execute commands on the remote machine from another machine.
If you need Safari on your Linux PC, you’ll be happy to know that it is possible to install it. In this guide, we’ll show you exactly how you can set up Apple Safari on Linux.
Arch Linux is powerful. It’s also very reliable, secure and all the things that make Linux such a great operating system. However, one thing that prevents many new users from adopting this distribution is its complexity. Arch Linux is simply not Ubuntu. And while there are tools such as the Octopi package manager GUI that make Arch easier to use, it can still be difficult to get applications such as Spotify installed with ease.
Sure, you can add the AUR repository, but even then Arch makes you trudge through a never-ending cycle of dependencies. Software installation alone on Arch Linux can permanently turn a new user away from the platform.
What do you do? You turn to Flatpak and Snap.
Jack Wallen walks you through the process of deploying Restya with Docker so you can start using Kanban boards in minutes.
I love a good Kanban board. Whether you go with a third-party host or host the boards yourself, there are tons of options available. Given my penchant for Linux, I tend to aim for open source solutions whenever possible.
Restyaboard is one such open source option for anyone looking to deploy an easy-to-use, feature-rich Kanban platform. Restyaboard includes everything you’ll need for a Kanban solution, such as multiple books, drag and drop, list copy, attachments, archive, private and public boards, filters, deadlines, built-in calendar, labels, iCal feed and custom board backgrounds. I show you how you can get Restya deployed in minutes with the help of Docker.
This tutorial will go over how to set up MariaDB Master-Master Replication on Debian 11 Servers. Additionally, we will go over how to synchronize time using Chrony between MariaDB servers.
Citra is an experimental open-source Nintendo 3DS emulator/debugger written in C++. It is written with portability, with builds actively maintained for Windows, Linux, and macOS. Citra emulates a subset of 3DS hardware and therefore is useful for running/debugging homebrew applications, and it is also able to run many commercial games!
The project was founded in 2014 and has since seen over 150 contributors! The team is very active and regularly releases new updates. The list of contributors can be found on GitHub. Citra is not affiliated with Nintendo. However, the company has expressed support for the project. In 2019, a Nintendo employee even contributed code to Citra! This shows that Nintendo is open to unofficial projects like Citra, as long as they are not harmful to the company’s business. Thanks to the hard work of the Citra team, fans of Nintendo 3DS games can enjoy their favorite titles on their PC or phone.
In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install Citra on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy Jellyfish using two different methods using the command line terminal along.
Running a cron job every 5 minutes is a commonly used cron schedule. In this quick how-to article, you will learn to schedule a cronjob to run every 5 minutes.
Over the years, I cannot tell you how many times I’ve had to use the Linux top command to troubleshoot problems on both server and desktop deployments. Top has always been one of those tools that never fails to feel as if it should be able to do more but never can. That’s why I’m always on the lookout for a top replacement.
When on the desktop, there’s always GNOME System Monitor, which is a very well-designed GUI that makes managing processes very simple. But even that tool has its limitations.
So when I came across a tool named btop, I was pretty thrilled to see that it took that old standby and gave it some much-needed features. Not only does btop list out various system usages (memory, disks, network and processes), but it also allows for interaction with the mouse. Even on a server installation, you can point and click your way around btop to view processes as a tree, hide or reveal certain displays, and access an options menu where you can tweak the look and feel of the display.
Running a program on an Arduino is easy, but have you tried doing it with a Pi? The Raspberry Pi is powerful enough to be a standalone computer and it’s also good enough to program a microcontroller.
Here, we’ll use a Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ to make an Arduino Uno blink an LED!
I love a good Kanban board. Whether you go with a third-party host or host the boards yourself, there are tons of options available. Given my penchant for Linux, I tend to aim for open source solutions whenever possible.
Restyaboard is one such open source option for anyone looking to deploy an easy-to-use, feature-rich Kanban platform. Restyaboard includes everything you’ll need for a Kanban solution, such as multiple books, drag and drop, list copy, attachments, archive, private and public boards, filters, deadlines, built-in calendar, labels, iCal feed and custom board backgrounds. I show you how you can get Restya deployed in minutes with the help of Docker.
Arch Linux is powerful. It’s also very reliable, secure and all the things that make Linux such a great operating system. However, one thing that prevents many new users from adopting this distribution is its complexity. Arch Linux is simply not Ubuntu. And while there are tools such as the Octopi package manager GUI that make Arch easier to use, it can still be difficult to get applications such as Spotify installed with ease.
Sure, you can add the AUR repository, but even then Arch makes you trudge through a never-ending cycle of dependencies. Software installation alone on Arch Linux can permanently turn a new user away from the platform.
What do you do? You turn to Flatpak and Snap.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install KDE Plasma on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, KDE is a free, open-source desktop environment for those unfamiliar with KDE Desktop. It provides Linux users with an alternative graphical interface to customize their desktop environment and applications for everyday use enhancement. The community of KDE developed 200 plus applications that are supported by Linux-based operating systems such as Krita, Kdenlive, Kdevelop, GCompris, and so on.
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 KDE Plasma 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.
In Linux, all directories and files have access permissions. You can use chmod to set your preferred access rights for different users. But what decides their default permissions? Let’s talk about umask.
The upcoming Godot 3.5 is now considered feature complete, and has received a lot of bugfixes and improvements over the past weeks thanks to all the testers and developers who reported and fixed issues. We are now at the Release Candidate stage, finalizing everything so that we can release 3.5-stable for all users.
We just announced that we'll enter feature freeze next week to focus on stabilizing the existing functionality in Godot 4.0 and prepare the first beta release. But we're not there yet and we'll keep having frequent alpha builds until we're ready to slap the beta label on the engine. So here we go with 4.0 alpha 13!
We're determined to deliver a stable release of Godot 4.0 as soon as possible. To achieve this, we need to shift the focus from implementing new and exciting features towards stabilizing the existing functionality and fixing bugs.
The road to Beta 1
With that in mind, effective August 3rd we're entering a feature freeze stage, and no changes to the roadmap for Godot 4.0 will be expected. If you have pending work that you absolutely want to see in Godot 4.0, submit it before August 3rd. You can either open a pull request or contact the Production team directly for your work to be considered.
In the last edition, I was talking about adding an appropriate dataset to the Comparator Activity. This blog majorly consists of its implementation and the new changes that we now have in the comparator.
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Other issues investigated included making the layout responsive for different screen sizes, handling errors in the log, fixing the logic to avoid multiple wins, adding consistency in variable declarations and their datatypes, adding canvas to the entire exercise view zone, and some issues that arose as a result of the activity’s restructuring, such as selection on tapping the rows and default selection of the first row when the activity opens.
Apart from this, dividing the repeated code snippets into a separate component file and keyboard binding for the activity have also been implemented this time.
A major part of the on-going preparations of version 6 of the KDE Frameworks is to see that the API breakage due to happen versus version 5 is mostly an API dropage. And software using KDE Frameworks 5 can already find and use the future-proof API in the version 5 series, next to the legacy one. So that the very hurdle to take on porting from KF5 to KF6 is minimal, ideally just changing “5” to “6”, once one has managed to get rid of using the legacy API. This also matches the approach taken by Qt for Qt5 & Qt6, so there is a common API consumer experience. And adding new API already in KF5 allows to field-test its practicability, so KF 6.0 starts with proven API.
libadwaita is a huge controversy in the Linux desktop community, because of GNOME’s stance towards themes.
I have heard a lot of misinformation surrounding GTK4 and libadwaita, mainly based on misunderstanding. I’d like to take some time to explain what GTK4 and libadwaita are, why GNOME decided to go this route and why it’s a huge step in the right direction.
Garuda Linux brings an important feature to the Arch world: snapshots and rollback.
Garuda Linux is an Arch derivative founded by Indian developer Shrinivas Vishnu Kumbhar, and named – as is the national airline of Indonesia – after the Hindu demigod who is the flying mount of Vishnu. Garuda is one of the newer distros we've looked at, founded in 2020.
We have recently looked at Arch Linux itself, and a couple of Garuda's other relatives – Manjaro Linux and EndeavourOS. Like its progenitor, Garuda is a rolling-release distro, but it periodically issues updated ISO images for installing new machines, so we took the new mid-July snapshot, codenamed "Talon", as a chance to take a look. We tried the Xfce version, but the selection of desktops is comprehensive: both a Mac-like tuned KDE edition, a KDE Lite version and a KDE-Git edition, plus GNOME, Cinnamon, LXQt, and MATE, and a choice of tiling window managers: Wayfire, Sway, i3WM, and Qtile.
Up front, Garuda has quite startling system requirements: it wants a full 30GB for its root partition, which is two or three times more than most distros ask. There is a good reason, though: Garuda formats the root partition with Btrfs, and uses the Snapper tool developed by SUSE.
JJM (esmourguit in the forum) has sent me updates for the French langpack.
pupRadio streamed online radio and TV stations; however, it was discussed on the forum that most of the TV URLs didn't work. Philh (forum name) has contributed to pupRadio over the years, and has now taken out the "pupTelly" component, so it now only steams audio.
For more than 7 and a half years now, OPNsense is driving innovation through modularising and hardening the open source firewall, with simple and reliable firmware upgrades, multi-language support, fast adoption of upstream software updates as well as clear and stable 2-Clause BSD licensing.
22.7, nicknamed "Powerful Panther", features the upgrade to FreeBSD 13.1, PHP 8.0, Phalcon 5, stacked VLAN and Intel QuickAssist (QAT) support, DDoS protection using SYN cookies, MVC/API pages for IPsec status and Unbound overrides, new APCUPSD and CrowdSec plugins plus much more.
LibreSSL flavour is scheduled for removal at the end of this series and will likely receive no further maintenance. Software failing to work properly starting with Tor will have its plugin removed from the flavour from now on to be able to keep updating the software to their latest versions in the OpenSSL flavour. The next major upgrade will automatically transition to the OpenSSL flavour, but we would encourage everyone to switch between 22.7.x for the least amount of possible impact.
Download links, an installation guide[1] and the checksums for the images can be found below as well.
We are pleased to announce that Red Hat Satellite 6.11.1 is generally available as of July 27, 2022.
Red Hat Satellite is part of the Red Hat Smart Management subscription that makes it easier for enterprises to manage patching, provisioning, and subscription management of Red Hat Enterprise Linux infrastructure.
What makes a great leader? Some of the most important and inspirational qualities have little to do with technology.
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 ten best quotes on soft skills below. Read on, or download the complete quote book for advice on leadership, soft skills, career development, strategy, and more.
Organizations across industries are turning to data and analytics to solve business challenges. A survey by New Vantage Partners found that 91 percent of enterprises have invested in AI. However, the same study found that just 26 percent of these firms have AI in widespread production.
Organizations are struggling to solve business challenges with AI. They find that building machine learning (ML) applications takes time and requires expensive maintenance and talent that’s in short supply. Leaders say that over 70% of data science projects report minimal or zero business impact.
Here’s how low-code ML platforms can help tackle these challenges.
Please join us at the next regular Open NeuroFedora team meeting on Monday 18 July at 1300 UTC. The meeting is a public meeting, and open for everyone to attend.
The wonderful people that make up Canonical have a goal: We want to be the best open-source company in the world, period.
I think it’s also a goal that’s espoused by our management, but that doesn’t take away from the fact that every person who works here probably wants to make the world a better place, probably through open-source software. It’s in our blood.
I’m really here because I want to write great documentation. Technical writers sometimes enjoy a rather low standard of excellence, to be honest. I’m very happy when someone finds a tiny little mistake in an obscure code example near the bottom of a long article; that means they’re reading it, and that’s often the main criteria of success for documentation. But that’s not the main criterion for me.
One of the main challenges within the automotive industry today is finding a solution that allows for efficient automotive fleet management. As our vehicles become more connected and require more security and safety than ever before, it becomes extremely important to have a fleet management solution that provides seamless software updates, data analysis and other functionalities.
If you've been thinking about investigating the free and open-source RISC-V instruction set architecture, there's never been a better time — and StarFive is hoping its VisionFive, a single-board computer built around a pair of SiFive RISC-V processor cores, will be just the push you need to jump in and play.
With 8GB of RAM, a number of acceleration coprocessors, Linux support, and a familiar 40-pin general-purpose input/output (GPIO) header, the VisionFive ticks a lot of boxes, particularly in the wake of SiFive's discontinuance of the HiFive Unmatched — but can it pass our hands-on testing?
The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), the all-volunteer developers, stewards, and incubators of more than 350 open source projects and initiatives, announced today Apache€® ShenYuâ⢠as a Top-Level Project (TLP).
Apache ShenYu is a Java-native API Gateway for service proxy, protocol conversion, and API governance. It provides a component-rich, easy to extend, and simple to deploy API gateway that reduces costs. ShenYu Gateway is written in Java and its components support multiple languages including .NET, Python, Go, and Java, and deployment with Lua, NGINX, Kubernetes, and Docker.
Different is dope. Firefox has always stood by this. It’s also the mantra of Abby Wren, the woman featured in the pilot episode of our new docuseries, “Firefox Presents.”
Launching Friday, April 15, “Firefox Presents” is a documentary series featuring colorful and inspiring creators who each have a unique journey of finding themselves or their community online. We speak with them about how they are using the internet to overcome obstacles, challenge the status quo and express themselves in a way that encourages and inspires other people to feel welcome and safer online.
Bootstrapped using GtkPopovers to implement popups from LibreOffice's main menubars for GTK4.
Help improve the Free Software Directory (FSD) by adding new entries and updating existing ones. Every Friday we meet on IRC in the #fsf channel on Libera.Chat.
If you’ve ever written any React code, you’ve probably used arrays to represent state: an array of todo items, articles fetched from the server, and more. But sometimes React doesn’t update after you change that state. Usually, that’s because you mutated an array instead of copying it - a mistake easily prevented by using read-only types like ReadonlyArray. Here’s why you should start switching to read-only!
React Studio is a free IDE and RAD tool for designers and developers that allows them in designing, prototyping, and building production-ready React apps.
The app is currently available for macOS 10.12 and later, it supports dynamic data, and comes with a rich and advanced visual layout editor.
React Studio supports progressive web apps (PWA) out-of-the-box, which work seamlessly on mobile platforms such as iOS, Android, as well as Chromebooks.
Hello! The other day we talked about what happened when you press a key in your terminal.
As a followup, I thought it might be fun to implement a program that’s like a tiny ssh server, but without the security. You can find it on github here, and I’ll explain how it works in this blog post.
the goal: “ssh” to a remote computer
Our goal is to be able to login to a remote computer and run commands, like you do with SSH or telnet.
The biggest difference between this program and SSH is that there’s literally no security (not even a password) – anyone who can make a TCP connection to the server can get a shell and run commands.
Obviously this is not a useful program in real life, but our goal is to learn a little more about how terminals works, not to write a useful program.
(I will run a version of it on the public internet for the next week though, you can see how to connect to it at the end of this blog post)
In this article, I’d like to talk about Android storage.
In recent Android versions, Google decided, for a good reason, to restrict the access to the SD card. This means, even if your application will have the old READ/WRITE_EXTERNAL_STORAGE permissions declared and granted, you won’t be able to freely access the SD Card contents like you used to.
In order to access the SD card or any other shared storage places, you’ll have to use the Android shared storage API. The good news is that, with this API, you’ll be able to access any file from any storage location (i.e. from gdrive), without any special code.
In our last look at Microchip's flexible PolarFire SoC Icicle Kit, which blends low-power high-performance field-programmable gate array (FPGA) technology with Linux-capable processing cores built around the free and open source RISC-V instruction set architecture (ISA), we built our own Linux distribution using the Yocto board support package (BSP) and ran a selection of workloads to put the system through its paces.
The Icicle Kit isn't designed as a single-board computer you just pick up and use to run pre-built binaries, though: it's a development tool first and foremost, and whether you're a professional or a hobbyist you're going to want to get your hands dirty coding in order to make the most of the board's capabilities.
I am going to be attending Akademy 2022 in person!
This is my first time going to Akademy in-person, so it is quite exciting! I will be doing a talk with Bhushan on the state of Plasma Mobile.
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Through 2020, I worked on many Plasma Mobile applications such as KWeather, and also started poking around contributing to the shell. I also did some work for the desktop, including some work on adding fingerprint support to the users kcm.
I spent the last week in Toronto in the Cpp North conference. It was so much fun just to hang around with people after such a long pause.My talk was about porting large code bases from one build system to another, using LibreOffice as an example The talk should eventually show up on Youtube but there is no precise schedule for that yet.
After the conference ended I had a few spare days to do touristy stuff which was also fun. On the last day when I was packing my stuff I noticed that there was a film crew just outside the conference hotel clearly shooting something. The area did not seem to be closed off so obviously I went in to take a closer look. It was past 9 pm and I only had my phone camera so all the pictures below are a bit murky. On the other hand you can clearly see just how much lighting power you need to shoot high quality video material.
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I stood next to one of the pillars shown in the middle of the picture next to a thing that looked suspiciously like a director's chair. I just leaned against the wall perfectly still while remaining calm and passive and nobody paid any attention to me at all. I could observe the crew going about their business, browse their monitors (which, sadly, did not show anything interesting) and even see their uncannily realistic looking baby prop up close. I was probably there for around 30 minutes or so until someone finally asked me if I was part of the crew and then kindly asked me to leave which I did.
Let’s examine four mistakes to avoid when writing programs that use GLib, or, alternatively, four mistakes to look for when reviewing code that uses GLib. Experienced GNOME developers will find the first three mistakes pretty simple and basic, but nevertheless they still cause too many crashes. The fourth mistake is more complicated.
These examples will use C, but the mistakes can happen in any language. In unsafe languages like C, C++, and Vala, these mistakes usually result in security issues, specifically use-after-free vulnerabilities.
It was not all that long ago that Python began its experiment with replacing one of its mailing lists with a forum on its Discourse discussion site. Over time, the Discourse instance has become more and more popular within the Python community. It would seem that another mailing list will soon be subsumed within Discourse as the Python steering council is planning to effectively retire the venerable python-dev mailing list soon.
OSMnx is a Python package that lets you download geospatial data from OpenStreetMap and model, project, visualize, and analyze real-world street networks and any other geospatial geometries.
Today most of the popular sites or application software are powered by Python as it is a widely used general-purpose programming language. Now why it is popular among users, all due to its simple yet easy-to-understand nature. We prefer using it all the time. As a bonus, it has many Integrated Development Environments which are used for editing and programming in it.
We usually suggest and prefer Vim/Nano for the terminal but many other IDEs such as PyCharm, GNU Emacs and PyZo are available for Ubuntu.
Gradio is an open-source Python library that is used to build machine learning and data science demos and web applications.
Wireless power, no matter how inefficient it may be, sounds good and even looks good with the “5V remote wireless power supply LED pack” we feature in this post. It also feels magical with the LEDs lighting up thanks to magnetic resonance coupling technology.
Today, Google is announcing the expansion of our partnership with SkyWater Technology. We are working together to release an open source process design kit (PDK) for SKY90-FD, SkyWater’s commercial 90nm fully depleted silicon on insulator (FDSOI) CMOS process technology. SKY90-FD is based on MIT Lincoln Laboratory’s 90 nm commercial FDSOI technology, and enables designers to create complex integrated circuits for a diverse range of applications.
The rise of the Open Source Program Office (OSPO) roughly mirrors the proliferation of Open Source software to build and run the most important technology applications within organizations in the world today. A well-designed OSPO is the center of competency for an organization’s Open Source operations and structure. Its role can include setting code use, distribution, selection, auditing, and other policies, as well as training developers, ensuring legal compliance, and promoting and building community engagement that benefits the organization strategically.
Security updates have been issued by Debian (firefox-esr), Fedora (chromium, gnupg1, java-17-openjdk, osmo, and podman), Oracle (grafana and java-17-openjdk), Red Hat (389-ds:1.4, container-tools:rhel8, grafana, java-1.8.0-openjdk, java-11-openjdk, java-17-openjdk, kernel, kernel-rt, kpatch-patch, pandoc, squid, and squid:4), Slackware (samba), and SUSE (crash, mariadb, pcre2, python-M2Crypto, virtualbox, and xen).
The Samba Team has released security updates to address vulnerabilities in multiple versions of Samba. An attacker could exploit one of these vulnerabilities to take control of an affected system.
From May through June 2022, CISA responded to an organization that was compromised by an exploitation of an unpatched and unmitigated Log4Shell vulnerability in a VMware Horizon server. CISA analyzed five malware samples obtained from the organization’s network and released a Malware Analysis Report of the findings.
Red Hat Product Security has been developing RapiDAST, a tool that can be used for security testing of products and services. It is also helpful for developers or quality engineers (QEs) to test the security of products during the software development life cycle (SDLC).
As the name suggests, RapiDAST is focused on performing rapid (automated) dynamic application security testing (DAST). While there are many security practices we can consider comprehensively for improving security posture of development environments — threat modeling, software composition analysis (SCA), static application security testing (SAST), fuzzing, penetration testing, etc. — this article focuses on DAST.
Kali is a Debian-based Linux distro designed specifically for penetration testing. While one can install the tools on any Debian distro to create an equally capable pentesting system, Kali comes with all of those tools built-in and is locked-down by default for security. Over the last few years, Kali has become a favorite of pentesters. And because it is a Debian-based distro, it runs well on single-board computers with ARM processors.
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In this case, that is the new Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W single-board computer. It's paired with a Pimoroni Hyperpixel 4.0" TFT LCD touchscreen and a Solder Party BlackBerry Q20 keyboard with built-in trackpad. That is a full QWERTY tactile keyboard with a breakout board that provides connectivity options, including the USB connection used here. A small USB hub provides USB-A connections, since the Raspberry Pi only has micro USB ports.
All of that hardware fits inside of a book called Supermind by Mark Phillips. Except it isn't actually a book. It's a hollow wood box that looks like a book. We can only imagine that grymoire feels like a spy any time he pulls this book off a shelf and open it up to reveal their pentesting rig.
Cybercriminals are now attacking the whole world in a very different way. In the past, they were just limited to the normal power users but nowadays they are targeting the critical infrastructures in our society. In most cases, they are trying to take down the whole industrial network and often ask for heavy ransoms. Even if they manage to get hold of a certain portion of the network, chances are that the industrial leader will pay the fees and get their system running again.
Such kind organized attacks on critical infrastructures were not prominent in the past. But things are changing fast and the hackers are trying to attack the organizations as they know it can help them to earn more money in a quicker way.
In the past cybercriminals have tended to shun Linux in favor of more widely used operating systems, but new data indicates that this trend is starting to shift. Statistics from the Atlas VPN team show new Linux malware reached record numbers in the first half of 2022, with nearly 1.7 million samples being discovered.
Today, Senators Ed Markey (D-MA) and Ron Wyden (D-OR), along with Rep. Doris Matsui (D-CA) and other co-sponsors, introduced a bill to reinstate net neutrality and the Federal Communications Commission’s authority over broadband service. The “Net Neutrality and Broadband Justice Act” would codify broadband as a “Title II” communications service, enabling the FCC to regulate it as such.
The bill effectively reverses the unprecedented abdication of authority over broadband that FCC Chairman Pai instigated in the agency’s 2017 repeal of its 2015 Open Internet Order that established the net neutrality rules under Chairman Tom Wheeler. Those rules prevented broadband providers from blocking websites, throttling web traffic, or creating “fast lanes” only for those able to pay for prioritization. This bill will not only restore these “net neutrality” protections, but also prevent a future-FCC from backtracking on other broadband consumer protections – fundamental in an increasingly online world. Public Knowledge urges Congress to swiftly pass this bill.
The following can be attributed to Jenna Leventoff, Senior Policy Counsel Public Knowledge:
“For over two decades, the FCC has worked steadfastly to protect consumers’ access to a free and open internet. Before Chairman Pai’s repeal of the agency’s popular net neutrality rules, both Democratic and Republican Commissions maintained authority over broadband. It was only during the Trump administration that the FCC, for the first time, disavowed any authority to fulfill its congressional mandate to ensure all Americans have access to communications services. We’re thrilled that Senators Markey and Wyden and Representative Matsui are taking action to rectify this colossal mistake.
Click on 'cheat' and enter the 7 letters of the puzzle, with the anchoring (central) letter at the end. The solutions, if any, will be shown after a short delay.
Please do not look up SpellBinding answers of today's puzzle. And you don't want to cheat anyway, right?
What I really wish I could do is taper off my meds as a sort of experiment. Sometimes I doubt whether I really need them.
What that would look like is that I'd need to be 100% sequestered for the duration of the tapering plus 6 months after the final dose. No responsibilities other than self-care. Sort of like a controlled rehab type thing.
I'd also need something like a benzodiazepine to help with the surge in anxiety and paranoia, but I'm not sure if that would be good because I don't want to become dependent on them.
I’m relieved that Manchin signed, because we’re getting a commitment of 40% emissions reduction by 2030, and that’s a hell of a lot better than what it looked like we were getting a few hours ago (and why I had been sobbing all week like the big old moper snowflake I am)...
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“Energy security” as Manchin defined it means fossils (domestic fossils, which is the “security” part). In other words, we are getting the opposite of what we asked for; some of the money from our precious bill is gonna go straight into the pockets of oil, gas, and coal.
For Linux; if there is a company behind the hard- and software like Valve with the Steam Deck or Jolla with Sailfish OS, it could work. But it is build as gaming console - damn this is a good handheld! - or for a smartphone, not as work horse. The folks at Tuxedo for example do a really good job on their comupters here in europe. The barebones from "Schenker" they use are just not as good as a Macbook - nothing for a guy like me with me who likes a good audio system for example. And the problem with "hey, i'm creating a very nice little program and use the latest and cutting edge libraries so you can't use it on your LTS linux"-problem still remains. Maybe a Purism Laptop would be a option, but they aren't present in "the old world" and getting a Librem 5 was a hassle.
* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It's like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.