● 12.13.21

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 13/12/2021: Kdenlive 21.12, digiKam 7.4

Posted in News Roundup at 7:38 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxDistributionsDevices/EmbeddedFree Software/Open SourceLeftovers

GNU/Linux

• Welcome to this week’s Linux Weekly Roundup. We had a full week in the world of Linux releases with Linux Mint 20.3 Beta, Freespire 8.0, Zorin OS 16 Lite, Calculate Linux 22, and Kali Linux 2021.4.

Audiocasts/Shows

• In today’s episode we answer the question, ‘What are some of the key differences between Linux distributions?’ Bill begins his evaluation of Elementary OS and we comment on Windows 11.

• Achieving the dream of mobile and desktop convergence turns out to be pretty easy. Plus a serious contender for the best Arch-based distro, and your feedback about hacking and Lineage OS.

• Tails is a portable Linux operating system that protects against surveillance and censorship. It is designed to be run as a live USB stick that you can take with you and use on any computer, when you need anonymity.

• Online privacy is more crucial than ever but how important is it protect you ip address, typically it’s seen as very important but is there more to it than many people would like to let on.

• CrowdSec is a free application you can run on your Linux server, which provides an additional layer of security. CrowdSec aims to prevent intrusions and other forms of malicious activity, but it does it in a different way – it utilizes intelligence gathered from other users in order to enhance its protection.

• Hello and welcome to the 444th installment of Linux in the Ham Shack. In this episode, the hosts discuss several short topics including some year-end news about the show, tiny SSB transceivers, the Wayland X server, the EU adopting and promoting open source, WSJT-X and much, much more. Thank you for listening and have a great week.

Kernel Space

• Just in case you weren’t already aware, Linus Torvalds announced the availability of Linux kernel 5.16-rc5, which is nothing more but a release candidate before 5.16.

• This delay has been blamed on the holidays by Linus, saying that they caused development to slow down. Thus, the release window is expected to be pushed back at least one week.

• Judging by the announcement, we can expect the usual filesystem updates, general kernel additions, and improvements to networking.

• The Purism team is continuously working on improving the hardware and software support for the Librem 5. These innovations contribute directly to the mainline, upstream kernel so that the hardware can be supported as part of the development community in the future.

• Following up on our report for Linux 5.14 and 5.15 this summarizes the progress on mainline support for the Librem 5 phone and its development kit during the 5.16 development cycle. This summary is only about code flowing upstream.

• [...]

• During this round we contributed only 2 Reviewed-by: or Tested-by: tag to patches by other authors. This definitely leaves some room for improvement! Again we would like to thank everybody who reviewed our patches and helped us supporting the hardware in mainline Linux – especially Sakari and again Laurent for reviewing the camera driver and even adding the initial data for it to libcamera.

• A minor update to AMD’s Radeon Open eCosystem “ROCm” software is out today for open-source GPU computing.

• Radeon ROCm 4.5 was introduced at the start of November and while we are awaiting the next major release perhaps where the RDNA/RDNA2 support will be ironed out, ROCm 4.5.2 was released as a pre-Christmas end-of-year update.

• This is a critical time for the Good Chip Intel. After the vessel driftied through the Straits of Lateness towards the Rocks of Irrelevance, Captain Pat parachuted into the bridge to grab the helm and bark “Full steam ahead!”

• Its first berth at Alder Lake is generally seen as a return to competitive form, but that design started well before Gelsinger’s return and there’s still zero room for navigational errors in the expeditions ahead.

• At least one of the course corrections looks a bit rum. Intel has long realised the importance of supporting open source to keep its chips dancing with Linux. Unlike the halcyon days of Wintel dominance, though, this means being somewhat more open about the down-and-dirty details of exactly how its chips do their thing. You can’t sign an NDA with the Linux kernel.

• It looks like EXT4 come Linux 5.17 could be making use of the kernel’s new mount API. Queued up into EXT4′s “dev” branch is transitioning the EXT4 file-system driver to using the kernel’s modern mount API.

• Linux’s new mount API is what came about in recent times as a set of system calls offering more flexibility than the long-standing mount syscall that is a one-shot effort while this new multi-step mounting procedure allows for more options. Below is a presentation by Canonical’s Christian Brauner from last year’s Open-Source Summit around the new mount API.

Graphics Stack

• AMD’s “RDNA” class GPUs support wavefront sizes of 32 and 64 compared to older GCN GPUs at 64 threads. Going back to 2019 RadeonSI began making use of Wave32 for some shaders but now for Mesa 22.0 next quarter there are greater Wave32 improvements that have landed.

• Well known open-source AMD OpenGL driver expert Marek Olšák has now landed the merge request, radeonsi: add Wave32 and primitive binning heuristics and shader profiles, stronger loop unrolling. In there is support for unrolling loops of up to roughly 128 iterations that helps the performance in some scenarios (like SPECViewPerf13), various NIR improvements, and then the Wave32 heuristics and shader profiles.

• After 23 years, AMD’s ancient 3DNow! instructions are finally being retired from the Linux kernel (via Phoronix). Starting with Linux version 5.17, older AMD processors with 3DNow! support will no longer run those instructions within Linux operating systems featuring the updated kernel.

• AMD released the 3DNow! instructions in 1998 to improve CPU functionality by adding SMID instructions to the base x86 instruction set, thus enabling vector processing of floating-point operations using vector registers. The first implementation had over 21 new instructions that supported SIMD floating-point operations.

• In the late 90s and early 2000s, these instructions were popular for improving gaming, video playback, and even Photoshop workflows. AMD supported the instructions with CPUs spanning from the K6-2 to Bulldozer chips.

• However, Intel introduced its competing SSE instructions shortly after AMD released its 3DNow! instructions for the K6 CPU. The SSE instructions became dominant with the arrival of Pentium 3, so AMD also adopted SSE by the time SSE2 arrived on the scene.

• Queued up as part of the x86/core changes intended for the Linux 5.17 cycle is dropping of the AMD 3DNow! code within the kernel. While 3DNow! brings back fond memories from the days of AMD’s K6 and early Athlon processors, AMD deprecated the instructions a decade ago and no longer found in newer processors. Removing of the 3DNow! kernel code is being done as part of some code improvements.

• Hitting tip’s x86/core branch is this commit dropping the 3DNow! code from the kernel. 3DNow! built upon MMX instruction set to offer faster performance for vector processing of floating point data. But 3DNow! ultimately didn’t see too much adoption amid Intel’s successful SSE introduction.

• Website Phoronix, a site heavily devoted on everything Linux, discovered that the ATI Radeon R300, R400, and R500 series GPUs are receiving a new driver under Linux after twenty years of life. This new driver is an open-source graphics driver created by developer Emma Anholt. The driver is intended to allow the GPUs to access the ability to request NIR shaders from the Mesa 3D library (via the state tracker in Mesa 3D) and send the NIR to the TGSI pathway. NIR minimizes the pressure of the GPU when running 3D level applications—essentially an optimization layer that is located at the core of the driver’s shader compilers received from Mesa.

• A bunch of almost 20-year-old graphics cards have received an open-source driver update, courtesy of developer Emma Anholt.

• As reported by Tom’s Hardware, the ATI Radeon R300, R400 and R500 are getting new drivers under Linux, allowing the GPUs to request NIR shaders from the Mesa 3D graphics library’s state tracker, and to use the NIR to TGSI path.

• Due to hardware limitations, the NIR could be available only for the R500, but this is yet to be confirmed.

Benchmarks

• GCC 12 is nearing release in a few months time as the annual feature update to the GNU Compiler Collection for this Free Software Foundation backed code compiler. On top of new C/C++ language features and various optimization improvements, there is updated tuning for Intel’s new Alder Lake processors. Here are some early GCC 11.2 vs. GCC 12 development benchmarks looking at the performance on a Core i5 12600K.

• GCC 11 as the stable compiler introduced earlier this year there was the initial Intel “alderlake” target. However, that initial implementation was carrying the exisiting Ice Lake cost table that was not tuned for Alder Lake processors that launched last month. Merged for GCC 12 is that tuned Alder Lake support in place for those compiling binaries specifically using the “-march=alderlake” option.

Applications

• Fwupd 1.7.3 is out today as the newest version of this open-source software that integrates with the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) for offering streamlined system and device firmware updates under Linux.

• The early Christmas gift of Fwupd 1.7.3 offers various fixes as well as initial support for Nordic Semiconductor’s nRF Secure devices. Fwupd landed the nordic-hid plug-in last week for performing device updates when connected via USB or Bluetooth Low Energy. The current plug-in works with Nordic firmware images compatible with the nRF Secure immutable bootloader.

• An application launcher makes things convenient to quickly navigate to an active window, launch a new app, and so on.

• Ulauncher is one such application launcher to use if your Linux distribution does not offer any out-of-the-box.

• If that spikes your interest already, you will find Fly-Pie interesting! An application launcher tailored for users who primarily use a mouse and always place one hand to navigate using the mouse instead of the keyboard.

• Blender Foundation recently released Blender 3.0 “to mark the beginning of a new era for open source 2D/3D content creation.”

• Blender is a popular free and open source 3D creation suite, which supports modeling, animation, simulation, rendering, video editing, game creation, and more.

• Chrome Browser is one of the most popular and user-friendly browsers made by google. It is available to install on all popular platforms like Linux, Windows, macOS, Android, and IOS.

• Users can easily manage their profiles and sync their Settings, Bookmarks, and Extensions across all platforms. Just make sure to use a common Gmail account on those platforms.

• Just installed Linux distributions like (Ubuntu/Linux Mint/Arch/Manjaro/RedHat/CentOS/Etc) and thinking about how I can migrate or import all of the data, settings, and profiles; from my windows 10/11 to Linux.

• The chrome browser file structure for user data is identical to Windows, Linux, or macOS. Users can easily export and import their data and settings like History, Bookmarks, Passwords, Cookies, Cache from one platform to another.

• PipeWire 0.3.41 delivers on improved compatibility with Flatpak sandboxed applications, continued work on enhancing JACK compatibility, OBS can now capture from monitor devices again when using the WirePlumber manager, memory leak fixes, and improved buffer memory allocation.

Instructionals/Technical

• Arma 3 is an open-world, realistic tactical military FPS. It was developed and published by Bohemia Interactive. If you’re a fan of real shooters, Arma 3 is a must-play. Here’s how you can play Arma 3 on your Linux PC.

• An issue often faced by Ubuntu users after installing Ubuntu or upgrading to a new version is the sound problem, or more specifically, the “no-sound” problem. This can happen for a variety of reasons. Sometimes it is related to a misconfiguration in the speaker settings, or maybe your hardware is not well-supported.

• For most people, it’s usually a pretty easy problem to resolve. This is because most problems stem from an issue with services running on the system. In this article we go through a few simple fixes you can try. You don’t necessarily have to try them all. Just start at the top of the list and work your way down.

• Linux has a bunch of useful commands to simplify certain operations on the system. df, for instance, helps you determine how much free disk space you have on a drive, whereas du shows the estimated file space usage on your system.

• While both these commands work well and do their job as intended, there’s another useful command called duf, an alternative to df that provides better disk monitoring functionality.

• In this guide, we’ll look at duf in detail and go over the steps to install and use it on Linux.

• Want to analyze disk usage on Linux? Here’s how to install and use duf, a free and open-source disk usage checker for Linux.

• Mantis is an open-source PHP-based bug tracking tool developed to provide efficiency and simplicity to track the software defect as well as project management. It supports various database backends which include Mysql, MS-SQL, and Postgresql.

• I am using Nginx Web Server instead of Apache. The installation steps in this tutorial were performed on the Ubuntu 20.04 LTS system.

• Linux kernel 5.15 has many new features, support, and security. The Linux 5.15 kernel release further improves the support for AMD CPUs and GPUs, Intel’s 12th Gen CPUs, and brings new features like NTFS3, KSMBD (CIFS/SMB3), and further Apple M1 support, amongst many other changes and additions.

• In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install the latest 5.15 Linux Kernel on CentOS Stream 8.

• While Docker is a useful tool for packaging and managing applications, it also presents many unique challenges, such as dealing with stored data. Usually, you add volumes to containers in the creation script, but what if you need to make new ones?

• If you’d like to employ a Chromebook as a developer machine, you might be interested in a new multi-Linux container feature in Chrome OS 98. Jack Wallen shows you how to enable and use it.

• In this tutorial guide, we are going to explore how to install the Flask framework on Ubuntu 21.10.

• Flask is a microweb framework written in Python. It is classified as a microframework because it doesn’t require particular libraries or tools. It has no database abstraction layer, form validation, or any other components where pre-existing third-party libraries provide common functions.

• Flask depends on jinja template engine and the Werkzeug WSGI toolkit.

• Amazon DynamoDB is a key-value and document database. It’s a fully managed, multi-region, multi-master, durable database and can handle more than 10 trillion requests per day. It has built-in security, backup and restore, and in-memory caching for internet-scale applications. We can build applications with virtually unlimited throughput and storage.

• For use cases that require even faster access with microsecond latency, DynamoDB Accelerator provides a fully managed in-memory cache. It is serverless with no servers to provision, patch, or manage and no software to install, maintain, or operate. It provides both provisioned and on-demand capacity modes. It encrypts all data by default.

• Wildfly is an application server written in Java and developed by RedHat. It is a simple, lightweight, and powerful server with a CLI and an admin console. It is open-source, cross-platform, and based on pluggable subsystems that can be added or removed as needed. It provides all the necessary features to run a Java web application.

• In this tutorial, I will show you how to install Wildfly with Nginx as a reverse proxy on Debian 11.

• Cockpit is an easy application to love. It puts your entire fleet of servers and workstations in a centralized control panel and gives you a fair amount of control over them. Perhaps it’s unsurprising that this includes virtual servers and workstations, but many sysadmins don’t realize they can manage virtual machine creation from Cockpit.

• Suppose you’ve been using virt-manager, GNOME Boxes, or some other tool to spin up virtual machines, but you use Cockpit for diagnostics and maintenance. In that case, you can now consolidate your tasks by managing virtual machines in the same interface.

• Flutter is a free, open-source SDK for creating cross-platform applications using a single code base. Designed, developed, and optimized by Google to be the ideal UI software development kit used for the development of Android, Linux, Mac, Windows, iOS, and Google Fuschia applications, Flutter is written in C, C++, and Dart, which makes it easy for seasoned developers to use it comfortably.

• Flutter has been getting traction in the development community since its release because it is attractive to professional developers for rapidly building apps as well as to new programmers who are excited about learning cross-platform app development. One issue, though, is that Flutter can be quite a headache to install.

• The VLC media player is an open-source, free portable, cross-platform media player software and streaming media server developed by the VideoLAN project. VLC can play nearly all known multimedia files and DVDs, Audio CDs, VCDs, and various streaming protocols and can be extended and customized with multiple plugins.

• In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install VLC Media Player on your Debian 11 Bullseye distribution.

• Sometimes, you might want to define your own custom $PATH variable which, in most cases, is not provided by your operating system. Doing this will enable you to invoke your variable from any location in the Linux shell without specifying the full path to the variable or command. In this tutorial, we will walk you through how you can set your custom $PATH variable in Linux. This works across all Linux distributions, so don’t worry about the distribution you are using. It will work just fine.

• f you don’t want to rely on some other service to save your password, secret codes and financial info then install your Password Manager client and server using Bitwarden. It is an open-source project. Here we learn the command to install Bitwarden Server on Ubuntu 20.04 Focal or 22.04 Jammy.

• Bitwarden Server is the project that serves as a backend to its front-end client applications used to manage Passwords. The Server project contains the APIs, database, and other core infrastructure items required to it worked properly.

• It has been written in C# using .NET Core with ASP.NET Core whereas the database is in T-SQL/SQL Server. It is cross-platform supported, hence can run on Windows, macOS, and Linux distributions.

• Well, whether it is social media, e-mail, or online shopping, we have to log in to all of them to start enjoying their services. However, increment in such platforms has increased the problem of remembering multiple usernames and passwords. To solve that, people tend to use common passwords and that makes their valuable data vulnerable and pushes them to become prey to hackers.

• I used to stay away from images when working online. Handling and optimizing images can be both imprecise and time-consuming.

• Then I found some commands that changed my mind. To create web pages, I use Jekyll, so I’ve included that in the directions. However, these commands will also work with other static site generators.

• Discord is a free voice, video, and text chat app used by tens of millions of people ages 13+ to talk and hang out with their communities and friends. Users communicate with voice calls, video calls, text messaging, media, and files in private chats or as part of communities called “servers.” Discord is available on Windows, macOS, and Linux Distros.

• In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install Discord client on Rocky Linux 8 using three different methods.

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Rundeck on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Rundeck is a free open-source software for automation services. With Rundeck, you can create simple to complex tasks on either the local machine or on a remote server. In other words, set Rundeck up on one machine and control all your data center Linux servers from a single point of entry. Rundeck is available in Enterprise (Commercial) and Community (Free) editions. Rundeck Enterprise offers more features than the Rundeck Community edition but with the license cost.

• 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 through the step-by-step installation of the Rundeck on Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal Fossa). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 18.04, 16.04, and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint.

Wine or Emulation

• The first release candidate for the upcoming Wine 7.0 was released a few days ago. Here’s what’s new and how to install it in Ubuntu.

• Wine is a free open-source software allows to run Windows apps in Linux, macOS and BSD. The latest development release now is Wine 7.0 RC1 that features…

Games

• PUBG is getting new anti-cheat measures along with its move to become free-to-play, and there are fears that this could pretty much scupper the chances of the shooter working with the Steam Deck handheld (or any Linux OS trying to run it via Proton, of course).

• PUBG announced its move to become free at the close of last week (albeit with Ranked mode still needing you to stump up some cash), and it makes the transition on January 12 (for both PC and consoles).

• The devs observed that with this switch to free-to-play, the specter of cheaters looms ever larger, as the “need for an effective anti-cheat system is more important than ever as banned accounts can easily and infinitely be replaced”, which is of course a fair point.

• PUBG is currently a game that doesn’t work at all on Linux due to anti-cheat, even with the Steam Deck coming it’s sounding like a game that won’t play nicely. Oh, it’s also going free to play.

• In their development letter posted on December 10, they outlined what they’ve been doing and their future plans for anti-cheat with PUBG. While previously PUBG relied on BattlEye, which does have Linux support and recently made it easy for developers to turn on support for Proton and the Steam Deck, their newer proprietary solution with Zakynthos is going to get more invasive and cause more problems.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• Coming five months after digiKam 7.3, the digiKam 7.4 release is here with a new tool that lets users share items on the network with a Motion JPEG stream server, as well as an improved Showfoto component that received a new left sidebar which can host a folder-view to help users quickly explore images from their local file system or a stack-view to host your favorite contents.

• An interesting change in digiKam 7.4 is the improved Image Quality Sorter tool, which helps users label images by accepted, pending, or rejected. Also improved is the database component, which now features the ability to use a local SQLite thumbnail database with an external MySQL configuration.

• Photo editing comes in many shapes and forms. Shapes and forms, geddit? Now, sometimes, you need a full-blown suite to get things done, and sometimes, you just need a few tiny annotations and markings on an image. Believe or not, doing the latter isn’t as trivial as one would expect.

• For heavy tasks, one can rely on the likes of GIMP or Krita (if we’re talking about freeware), perhaps IrfanView. If you struggle with these, you could load LibreOffice Impress and use text boxes and arrows and shapes to get the desired effect. Dedicated programs intended for lightweight image styling are far and few in between. But I’ve found a nice little tool, and it’s called Ksnip. Follow me.

• [...]

• I am quite pleased with this almost accidental discovery. KSnip is a solid program, managing to balance simplicity and power quite well. You have lots of options available, without going overboard or making the usage slow and difficult. It makes for an excellent educational tool, allowing you to create visual guides and presentations with ease.

• And so, if you need to mark your images with text and some arrows, and perhaps add a small effect here or there, KSnip is the perfect software for the task. You can always do more with the big programs, if you need to, but for ordinary needs and quick editing, it delivers. The usage is intuitive, there were no quirks or bugs, and I was able to make my modifications without having to read hours of tutorials on how to generate a speech balloon or create an arrow. Fast ‘n’ furious, JPEG style. Mission accomplished.

• The last and most exciting release of Kdenlive this year is out and brings long awaited features like Multicam Editing and Slip trimming mode, all of which drastically improve your editing workflow. This version also comes with a new deep-learning based tracking algorithm, an auto-magical noise reduction filter and support for multiple Project Bins. Speaking of Bins, now you can import your video footage or audio recording folders while automatically ignoring any sub-folder structures created by some devices, such as the Sony XDCam, Panasonic P2, Canon camcorders or Zoom audio recorders. Apart from all these nifty, features the new Kdenlive adds a vast array of enhancements and fixes across many aspects, most notably to same-track transitions and the motion tracker. We also added an option to loop the selected clip in the timeline, and, by pressing ESC, you can now default back to selection mode when using the editing tools. In other news, we have switched our user manual to a new architecture called Sphinx. Sphinx provides a better and more user-friendly experience while making it easier to maintain. During this move we’ve started updating old sections, while adding new ones. It is a great opportunity for the community to contribute, check it out here! The macOS (Intel version) is now considered stable and ready for prime time. We’ve also updated the license of our code base to GPLv3.

• Video editing on Linux is in a great place thanks to open source software like Kdenlive.

• And today it just got even better.

• Kdenlive is already the go-to video editor for Linux desktops, and today’s monster new release front-loaded with pro features is only going to cement that fact further.

• The non-linear editor now boasts native multi-cam editing, gains an enhanced noise reduction filter, and intros Slip trimming mode (an editing technique favoured by many professional editors who say it speeds up their workflow).

• Slip trim is an exciting addition on its own, but it isn’t the only advanced editing mode Kdenlive devs have planned. Ripple, Slide, and Roll trim modes will be coming to Kdenlive in future updates.

Distributions

• Zorin OS is an outstanding operating system. It’s equal parts performance, simplicity and elegance. But the developers understood the full version of their platform wasn’t quite as usable on older or lesser-powered hardware. To fix that they created Zorin OS 16 Lite.

Screenshots/Screencasts

• In this video, I am going to show an overview of Kali Linux 2021.4 and some of the applications pre-installed.

• Today we are looking at Linux Mint 20.3 Beta, XFCE edition. It is based on Ubuntu 20.04, Linux Kernel 5.4 (but you can easily upgrade it to 5.13), XFCE 4.16, and uses about 1GB of ram when idling. Enjoy!

IBM/Red Hat/Fedora

• The Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and Red Hat Insights teams invite you to try the public beta of the Image Builder hosted service, a part of the Insights application suite which is included with the RHEL subscription.

• The Image Builder service, which can be found in the left navigation of the Red Hat Hybrid Cloud Console beta, simplifies and streamlines the process of assembling your own customized RHEL operating system images with the latest content and security updates for all of your hybrid cloud environments.

• Today, building or installing operating systems for deployment across your hybrid cloud environments can be slow, tedious, and error prone. Building and updating a server image for traditional virtualization platforms require different tools and risky modifications to make it work in public cloud environments.

• The automotive computing world, like many other industries, is going through a transformation. Traditionally discrete computing systems are becoming more integrated, with workloads consolidated into systems that look remarkably more like edge systems than embedded devices. The ideas driving this shift come from open source, but will Linux be part of this future, given that the existing standards for functional safety do not currently accommodate Linux-based operating systems?

• Participate in Tidelift’s fourth annual open source survey and help shed light on how organizations manage their use of open source components for application development.

• In the panicked move to remote work in 2020, most organizations cobbled together quick-and-dirty accommodations just to keep the business running. Plans for digital transformation accelerated at warp speed as employees shifted to working from home overnight with virtually no time for planning, research, or preparation. Instead of the thoughtful and careful rollout CIOs envisioned, they were instead forced to make urgent decisions and hope for the best, assuming this would all be short-lived.

• Instead, those crisis plans became status quo, making 2021 the year of hybrid work. As organizations have settled into this new reality, it’s clear there’s no turning back. Despite best-laid plans, many CIOs believe the pace of digital transformation will continue to accelerate, primarily catalyzed by outside forces beyond their control.

• If you’re feeling a little rusty in the social skills department these days, you are not alone. In fact, there’s a name for it: post-pandemic reentry anxiety.

• It may take you some time to wrap your head around returning to face-to-face working conditions – or even a mix of office and remote work – after more than a year of remote work. Indeed, in February of this year, as promising light appeared at the end of this pandemic tunnel, U.S. adults reported their highest stress levels since the earliest days of the Covid-19 crisis, according to a survey by the American Psychological Association.

• Of course, the softer skills of management, relationship building, communication, and collaboration are more critical than ever.

• If you find you need a little remedial people skills training, take heart: We’ve gathered 10 great books to consider, several of which address the additional challenges of ongoing remote or hybrid interactions.

• Red Hat became the largest open source company in the world before being acquired by IBM, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux is the company’s primary offering. This Linux-based OS has shown how much money a company can make by developing free software and supporting it through paid contracts.

• As the name suggests, Red Hat Enterprise Linux is intended for businesses and organizations. If you want to run your own personal server, registering a copy of RHEL can feel excessive. Fortunately, there are a number of alternatives that use the exact same code and can run the same apps, as RHEL.

• This article will cover how to install and setup official Nvidia drivers on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, this method has been tried and tested on RHEL 8.

• This works best on the default kernel that ships with RHEL 8, if you have custom Kernel or modified setup, there might be need for extra steps. The extra steps are out of the scope of this article.

Debian Family

• Anyone who temporarily needs a particularly secure work environment that protects sensitive documents and enables largely anonymous surfing does not have to spend hours manually installing the software. In fact, it only takes half an hour and an empty USB stick to set up such an environment. Tails (The Amnesic Incognito Live System), which focuses on data protection and privacy, can be started from here – as required and regardless of the existing operating system.

• The preconfigured Linux distribution routes all data traffic over the Tor network, which anonymizes connection data. If you use the USB stick while traveling, you don’t have to worry about traces of data on external hard drives: As a live system, Tails basically saves data in RAM – and therefore only until the next reboot. Optionally, selected settings and documents survive the restart in a special memory area of ​​the stick. It is encrypted and password-protected, so that the loss of the stick is not a catastrophe. Pre-installed, proven programs for encrypted mail, chat and data exchange as well as some office applications make Tails a fully-fledged operating system not only for the suitcase.

• In this article we explain how to create a universal USB stick with Tails and how to put the live system into operation. Then we show the first configuration steps and give a brief overview of the pre-installed software.

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

• Back a few months ago, we did a feature poll on our MAAS forum, and the most-requested new feature turned out to be “Recommission/rescan a machine after it has been deployed“. With the release of MAAS 3.1, we’ve added that feature. Here’s a sample of how it works.

• With rising unit shipments and hardware spending, 2021 will go into the record books as a critical year in the ever-increasing adoption of connected devices. Ubuntu – the modern, open-source Linux operating system for the enterprise server, desktop, and cloud – is rapidly becoming the de-facto standard for Internet of Things ( IoT) devices. The following is not an exhaustive list of all the 2021 initiatives surrounding intelligent ‘things’ and Ubuntu, but an overview of some of the progress made at the intersection of those two landscapes.

• Canonical, the publisher of Ubuntu, once again claimed its leadership in innovation by releasing Ubuntu Core images specially optimised for Intel’s purpose-built line of processors for IoT devices. Continuing the mission of supporting inventors, educators, and makers everywhere, Canonical also announced Ubuntu support for the newest Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W.

• But enough with anticipating what is to come. With 2022 just around the corner, and IoT endpoints reaching an installed base of 25.1B units after growing at a 32% CAGR in the past four years, it is time to assess the pivotal role Ubuntu, the most widely deployed server operating system on the Internet, played in spurring such unprecedented growth [1].

• [...]

• To say 2021 was the year Ubuntu, the most secure and trusted enterprise-grade OS, affirmed its de-facto presence in the embedded and IoT spheres is a generous but fair assessment.

Devices/Embedded

• Cincoze DI-1100 is a rugged, modular embedded computer powered by an Intel Whiskey Lake processor that comes in a fanless metal enclosure with heat dissipation fins, but the company also offers an external fan that clips on top of the metal case for additional cooling when using high-power peripherals such as PoE cameras.

• Designed for autonomous robots, in-vehicle use, environmental monitoring, and other industrial applications, the computer supports -40 to 70°C wide temperature range, 9 to 48 VDC input voltage range, and comes with plenty of I/Os including two Gigabit Ethernet ports, six USB ports, two RS232/422/485 interfaces, as well as mini PCIe sockets, and CFM and CFI expansion modules.

• [...]

• The company offers Windows 10 and Linux operating systems and tested the operating temperature with PassMark Burn-In Test (100% CPU, 2D/3D Graphics) without experiencing thermal throttling.

Open Hardware/Modding

• We’re looking for you to help with the Arduino IDE 2.0 Release Candidate (RC), which is available right now. Whether you’re an Arduino power user or new to microcontroller coding, there are a variety of ways that you can contribute to this exciting new release.

• Tuya is an All-in-one IoT Platform that enables the user to build smart IoT solutions by connecting devices efficiently, securely, and reliably. This is a getting started article to set up the Tuya platform with the Espressif’s ESP32 boards via tuya link SDK. Further, we use it to control an LED through an Android device. When the switch in the Tuya Smart App is turned ON, the LED connected to the ESP32 board glows and vice versa.

• The project reimagines the electronics of an electric guitar from the ground up. Instead of typical electromagnetic pickups, six individual piezo pickups are built into the bridge – one for each individual string. The outputs of these pickups is conditioned and then read by the analog-to-digital converter of a Freescale Kinetis K40. The DSP-capable chip can then be used to apply all manner of effects. [Eli] demonstrates the guitar providing an uncanny imitation of an acoustic guitar, before demonstrating jazz and overdrive tones as well.

• We’ve only started to tap into the potential of the brand new Pi Zero 2. Having finally received his board, [Brian Dorey] shows us how to boost your Pi’s WiFi, the hacker way. Inline with the onboard WiFi antenna can be found a u.FL footprint, and you just know that someone had to add an external antenna. This is where [Brian] comes in, with a photo-rich writeup and video tutorial, embedded below, that will have you modify your own Zero in no time. His measurements show seeing fourteen networks available in a spot where he’d only see four before, and the RSSI levels reported have improved by 5 dB -10 dB, big when it comes to getting a further or more stable connection.

• [...]

• This trick should be pretty helpful if you’re ever to put your new Pi Zero in a full-metal enclosure. Curious about the Raspberry Pi antenna’s inner workings? We’ve covered them before! If you’d like to see some previous Raspberry Pi mods, here’s one for the Pi 3, and here’s one for the original Zero W – from [Brian], too!

• Performing a resto-mod on a beloved piece of childhood technology can be quite a ride. In [Bertrand]’s case, it was the keyboard to their Atari 130XE. Although it has those cool double-shot keycaps, they’re hiding a crappy membrane underneath that could really benefit from a mechanical upgrade. Relax — the membrane part was broken.

• [Bertrand] designed and printed some new stems for Kailh box pinks that can accept both of the two known variants instead of the standard Cherry MX receptacle. He also made a new PCB (natch) and a keyboard adapter to replace the membrane interface, and had a steel keyswitch plate custom cut. The so-called Atari 130MX mod can be used with an Atari 130XE computer, or as a regular keyboard for a PC if you solder in a Pico.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• Finding the best PDF readers suitable and fulfilling all your needs in Linux? Then you are in the right place.

• Portable Document Format, aka PDF, is one of the most popular file formats. Due to the flexibility and tools, users get while reading ebooks or documents in PDF.

• Some Linux distributions provide PDF reader/viewer out of the box for you. Depending upon your usability, this PDF reader/viewer is often not fulfilling your all needs.

• Today, we will cover 5 top-rated best PDF readers/viewers in Linux, which come with all the necessary tools to have in your PDF reader/viewer.

Web Browsers

• Does the phrase private browser ring a bell? Considering the questionable digital privacy conditions, such programs are becoming increasingly popular.

• A private browser is a web browser that helps you keep your browsing history and other data confidential. It does this by enabling specific security mechanisms and reducing the opportunities for entities to track you. Thus, such tools are great for keeping your data safe from prying eyes, whether it be someone who might be snooping on your computer or trackers that log your interactions with the web. Let’s see which private browsers are the best for your Linux operating system.

FSFE

• Many accusations have been distributed about the source of the photographs of an Ubuntu employee’s underage girlfriend

• Here are facts.

• People have been discussing the photographs as they are in the public interest. Free software communities are full of false accusations of abuse. Jeffrey Epstein and many similar offenders continued to get away with things for years by hiding in a smokescreen of false accusations. The photos help bring the Ubuntu employee out of the smokescreen.

• Debian gulag wanted to protect Ubuntu so they set up a Kangaroo Court to blame an Australian. The photos here prove the extent of Debian deception.

• The photos were published on Wikimedia Commons under the categories related to OSCAL. You can use this search to find hundreds of photos of Albanian women.

• On December 15, the Digital Markets Act, the EU’s comprehensive regulatory package for internet platforms, will go through plenary voting at the European Parliament. The FSFE calls for consolidating Device Neutrality to enable fair and non-discriminatory use of Free Software in digital devices.

• The European Union is about to introduce a major overhaul of Internet legislation with the Digital Markets Act (DMA). After successful committee voting on 22 November, the European Parliament will conduct plenary voting on 15 December. The FSFE advocates Device Neutrality as a fundamental step to achieve a contestable, open, and competitive digital market in the EU and urges the European Parliament to secure this principle in the final voting.

Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

Open Access/Content

• Open Access is a publication model that allows anyone to use and access scientific papers produced by an academic journal or publication.

• Historically, interested readers (Researchers, students… etc) need to pay for a subscription if they want to access the scientific papers produced by an academic publication, or they may need to pay the access price only for the articles they want to get.

• Alternatively, they may also access them with the help of their universities or sponsoring institutes, which usually provide a free full/partial subscription for their researchers.

• Those access fees could range anywhere from $20 to $500 per paper, and the monthly subscription fees are in a similar price range as well.

• However, those access fees are a huge barrier for independent researchers which are not affiliated with a university or a funding source. Anyone who has tried to publish a scientific paper must have needed to read tens of related papers in the literature, and if he or she are going to pay for every single article they need to access, then they won’t be able to do science.

• These fees are heavy even for universities themselves; they have to pay millions of dollars each year in order to keep providing their researchers with the scientific literature access they need. Sometimes, they may not have the enough funding to sign contracts with all the needed publishers, and hence, researchers have to deal with this situation for their own.

Programming/Development

• In this guide, we will install the latest version of Node Js and NPM in Ubuntu, RedHat, CentOS, Manjaro and run the first application in Linux.

• Node Js is not a programming language but a javascript runtime for backend development, developed in chrome v8 javascript engine. To make development easier for the web developer who wants to have one skillset for frontend and backend.

• NPM is a package manager for Node Js that helps to install modules within the terminal. Mostly used to discover, install, publish modules, just like a PIP for Python.

• C is one of the fastest running programming language, a lot of developers start their development journey with C. You can write and compile C in Linux, Windows, and macOS.

• Linux is one of the favorite operating systems among developers for its open-source and in-hand tools for development. Node JS, PHP, Python name any programming language, and you can write and run it in Linux.

Perl/Raku

• And if you’re in doubt yet whether Santa was really overloaded last year, just check out the advent calendar of 2020. That’s why back then I fetched out an old, dusty reddish-white cap, pulled it over my ears and started a small home-brew project to help my wife in her job.

• To be fully honest here, it was a gift to myself too since for some time I planned to learn more about front-end programming. A good chance to look at Vue and TypeScript, why not to take it? There is Cro, Cro::RPC::JSON for APIs, Red for databases. Of course, there is Raku to bind them all… Oh, pardon me, it’s a different epic story to be told when time comes!

• This article (is it really a post? ah, whatever…) started with something, any one doing backend development knows well about: the need to monitor the server script, restart it upon failures, or when sources changes, etc., etc. Aside of that, I also wanted to keep my eye on rebuilds of the frontend code. And since I didn’t like keeping both tasks in two different shell sessions, I came up with a script runner.raku which was controlling them and juggling processes the way I needed.

Shell/Bash/Zsh/Ksh

Leftovers

Science

• [Voltlog] often looks at interesting test equipment and in the video below he reviews something that isn’t very common in hobby labs: a differential oscilloscope probe. These are usually pretty expensive, but the Micsig probe in the video costs under $200. The question, of course, is what do you need with a differential probe?

• A typical scope probe has a ground lead that connects directly to the actual grounding point. This can cause a problem if you try to measure across some component that has more voltage than you want to short to ground. It might hurt your device under test, your scope, or both.

• One of the most common projects we see here at Hackaday is a clock. It could just be that we as humans are fascinated by the concept of time or that making a piece of functional art appeals to our utilitarian sense. In that spirit, [Alexandre Chappel] set out to make a large mechanical clock with complex gears.

• The initial design was made in Fusion360 over a week and then in a somewhat bold move, [Alexandre] started up the CNC and cut all the parts out of valchromat. The basic idea of the clock is that the numbers move on the clock, not the hands. So the clock should show 10:25 instead of moving hands to the 10 and the 5. Most of the clock is made of up stacked gear assemblies, geneva drives, and many bearings. A single stepper motor drives the whole clock, which [Alexandre] admits is a bit of a cheat since trying to add springs and an escapement would add complexity to an already complex clock. He did have to adjust and recut a few gears but most of the assembly came together nicely. Some 3d printed numbers dropped into the CNCed slots offers much-improved readability.

• No matter how many syllables you use to say it, aluminum is one of the most useful industrial metals we have. Lightweight, strong, easily alloyed, highly conductive, and easy to machine, cast, and extrude, aluminum has found its way into virtually every industrial process and commercial product imaginable.

• Modern life would be impossible without aluminum, and yet the silver metal has been in widespread use only for about the last 100 years. There was a time not all that long ago that aluminum dinnerware was a status symbol, and it was once literally worth more than its weight in gold. The reason behind its one-time rarity lies in the effort needed to extract the abundant element from the rocks that carry it, as well as the energy to do so. The forces that locked aluminum away from human use until recently have been overcome, and the chemistry and engineering needed to do that are worth looking into in our next installment of “Mining and Refining.”

Hardware

• Building something, of course, requires your electronics skills. But packaging it is often an exercise in mechanics. You can buy off the shelf, of course, but sometimes it is hard to find just the right enclosure. You probably have a 3D printer, too, but sometimes 3D printing an entire case can be time consuming and isn’t always completely attractive. Enter [Johannes-Bosch] and Fusion 360. These 3D printed frames assemble into boxes and are easy to customize. The panels are aluminum, although we imagine you could substitute wood, acrylic, or even a 3D printed sheet of plastic, if you wanted to.

• If a combination multimeter and oscilloscope is on your holiday shopping list this year, you might want to have a look at some of [Kerry Wong’s] recent videos on the subject. Over several videos he looks at — inside and out — an OWON HDS272S and a Hantek 2D72, both reasonably inexpensive entries in the field. Both instruments are similar and have a few variants depending on the frequency capability and the addition of a waveform generator.

• 3D printers are typically the tool you use when you want a one-off quick prototype. However, more and more, they’re being used to produce things in quantity. [Uncle Jessy] decided to try out the resin stacking technique in order to quickly produce many figurines on his resin printer. However, not everything went exactly to plan.

• The technique is simple. The idea is to produce many copies of an object in a single continuous print on a resin 3D printer. To achieve this, the object is cloned many times, and scaffolding is created to allow the stacking of multiple objects on top of each other. This must be done carefully to avoid ruining the geometry of the object, and similarly to support material, uses more resin in the process.

Integrity/Availability

Proprietary

Pseudo-Open Source

Privatisation/Privateering

Linux Foundation

• The Linux Foundation (LF) will spend over $180m in 2021, 20 per cent up on last year, and highlights the role of its new LFX platform in its just-published annual report.

• A non-profit formed in 2000 to support the development of the Linux kernel as well as the wider Linux and open source ecosystem, the LF is the parent foundation of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), stewards of Kubernetes and other projects.

• Initial focus for the Cloud Hypervisor project will be security and modern operation for Cloud.

Security

• Security updates have been issued by Arch Linux (chromium, firefox, gitlab, grafana, grafana-agent, thunderbird, and vivaldi), Debian (apache-log4j2, privoxy, and wireshark), Fedora (firefox, grub2, mariadb, mod_auth_openidc, rust-drg, rust-tiny_http, and rust-tiny_http0.6), Mageia (chromium-browser-stable, curaengine, fetchmail, firefox, libvirt, log4j, opencontainers-runc, python-django, speex, and thunderbird), openSUSE (clamav, firefox, glib-networking, glibc, gmp, ImageMagick, log4j, nodejs12, nodejs14, php7, python-Babel, python-pip, webkit2gtk3, and wireshark), Red Hat (mailman:2.1 and samba), and SUSE (bcm43xx-firmware, firefox, glib-networking, ImageMagick, kernel-rt, and python-pip).

• I’ve talked on this topic before but I realized I never did a proper blog post on the topic. So here it is: how we develop curl to keep it safe. The topic of supply chain security is one that is discussed frequently these days and every so often there’s a very well used (open source) component that gets a terrible weakness revealed.

• Don’t get me wrong. Proprietary packages have their share of issues as well, and probably even more so, but for obvious reasons we never get the same transparency, details and insight into those problems and solutions.

• NSO Group’s descent into Internet pariah status continues. Its Pegasus spyware was used against nine US State Department employees. We don’t know which NSO Group customer trained the spyware on the US.

• After it hacked dissidents and journalists for years, news that NSO’s technology targeted US diplomats has brought on sanctions and lawsuits. Plus, big oil’s big PR push.

• As you might have already heard in the media, a quite severe security problem in Apache log4j is ripping its way through the world – filed as CVE-2021-44228.

• IPFire itself, nor our infrastructure, is or was at any time vulnerable to this problem since we are not using any Java software in either of them.

• Cybercriminals are quickly ramping up efforts to exploit the critical flaw found in the widely used Log4j open-source logging tool, targeting everything from cryptomining to data theft to botnets that target Linux systems.

• The cybersecurity community is responding with tools for detecting exploitation of the vulnerability, a remote code execution (RCE) flaw dubbed Log4Shell and tracked as CVE-2021-44228. Efforts include a Log4j emergency patch from the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) and a “vaccine” released by Cybereason as a fix for the issue.

• If you work in Infosec, you had a very lousy weekend. And that’s because of the Log4j zero-day vulnerability (CVE-2021-44228) that was discovered. We had no choice but to roll up our sleeves to help our community before things got messier than they already were.

• A CVE has been reported on the popular logging implementation log4j.

• As the PostgreSQL JDBC driver does not include this as a dependency we have determined that there is no need for concern. The driver is not vulnerable to this CVE.

Privacy/Surveillance

• The Electronic Frontier Foundation warns against Manifest V3, a set of changes coming to a Chrome browser near you.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• Representative democracy is quietly being phased out to be replaced with a “new normal.” This “new normal” is a nascent form of governance being referred to as “civil society.” It is founded upon the principles of communitarianism and it is being offered to us as an illusory replacement for representative democracy.

• The Global Public-Private Partnership (G3P), who set the worldwide policy agenda, have long-seen the manipulation of the concept of civil society as a means to achieve their ambitions. This is at odds with how many emergent “civil society” groups understand their allocated roll.

• Set against the background of a corporate, global state, in this article, we will explore the exploitation of communitarian civil society and consider the evidence that, despite possibly good intentions, civil society is very far from the system of increased democratic accountability that communitarians had hoped for. In the hands of the G3P, what they refer to as “civil society” is a tyranny.

Censorship/Free Speech

• As many as 9,849 accounts across social media platforms were blocked in 2020, almost a three-fold increase than those blocked in 2019, the Centre told Parliament on Wednesday.

• The information was shared by the ministry of electronics and information technology in Lok Sabha after Congress MP, Mohammad Faizal P.P sought to know year-wise details of the number of blocked accounts on social media platforms under Section 69A of the Information Technology (IT) Act since 2014.

• “…Government has directed for blocking of 471, 500, 633, 1,385, 2,799, 3,635 and 9,849 number of Accounts/URLs during the years 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019 and 2020, respectively,” the minisry said.

• Chinese state-owned media has run an interview with a woman – identified only by her last name Zhou – who alleged she was fired after claiming one of the firm’s execs raped her while on a business trip, according to an interview between Zhou and Dahe Daily.

• Zhou was allegedly sexually assaulted on a business trip by a superior back in August, after being pressured to drink excessively with clients. When she reported the incident, Zhou said Alibaba executives demanded she produce video evidence before they would take action. Desperate to be heard, Zhou took to the company intranet, where she posted an 8000-word account of her accusations. She also distributed pamphlets in the corporate canteen.

• Dahe Daily published an interview from December 9 with Zhou, where she states that the e-commerce giant terminated her contract without severance pay at the end of November, on the grounds that she spread false information – specifically “being raped by executives and not handling the company’s knowledge” and violated corporate policies that forbid “publishing or disseminating inappropriate remarks to the outside world, or deliberately fabricating or disseminating fictitious facts, or disseminating unverified information, causing a bad impact.”

Monopolies

Patents

• In accordance with Article 112(1)(a) EPC, Technical Board of Appeal 3.3.02 has referred the following points of law to the Enlarged Board of Appeal by interlocutory decision of 11 October 2021 in case T 116/18:

• If for acknowledgement of inventive step the patent proprietor relies on a technical effect and has submitted evidence, such as experimental data, to prove such an effect, this evidence not having been public before the filing date of the patent in suit and having been filed after that date (post-published evidence):

• 1. Should an exception to the principle of free evaluation of evidence (see e.g. G 3/97, Reasons 5, and G 1/12, Reasons 31) be accepted in that post-published evidence must be disregarded on the ground that the proof of the effect rests exclusively on the post-published evidence?

• Kathi Vidal is set to appear before the Senate Judiciary Committee for her USPTO Director nomination hearing tomorrow. She is likely to face tough questioning from lawmakers with very different views of the US patent system

• Kathi Vidal is set to appear before the Senate Judiciary Committee for her USPTO Director nomination hearing tomorrow.

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