● 01.01.22

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 1/1/2022: Slackel 7.5 and Septor 2022

Posted in News Roundup at 1:30 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxDistributionsDevices/EmbeddedFree Software/Open SourceLeftovers

GNU/Linux

• Cat command is used to read and print file content on a terminal screen. While tac command is similar to a cat command, but the difference is data will print in reverse order.

Kernel Space

Graphics Stack

• For those wanting to enjoy the F1 2021 racing game on Linux via Valve’s Steam Play, it’s slowly getting into good shape. The latest enhancement is on the Radeon Vulkan driver side with Mesa’s RADV adding a workaround targeting the game.

• Samuel Pitoiset of Valve’s Linux graphics driver team has landed a workaround in Mesa 22.0-devel Git (and also marked for back-porting to Mesa 21.3 stable) for fixing severe flickering issues exhibited by F1 2021 within the in-game menus.

Benchmarks

• Since we are all about performance and numbers, here is a look at the 2021 statistics for OpenBenchmarking.org itself as the online complementary component to the Phoronix Test Suite.

• Here are some year-end stats on OpenBenchmarking.org for the health of open-source benchmarking, which in 2021 marked ten years since OpenBenchmarking.org went public alongside Phoronix Test Suite 3.0.

Applications

• Here are the latest updates to our compilation of recommended software.

• Avidemux is a free video editor designed for simple cutting, filtering and encoding tasks. It supports many file types, including AVI, DVD compatible MPEG files, MP4 and ASF, using a variety of codecs. Tasks can be automated using projects, job queue and powerful scripting capabilities. Avidemux is available for Linux, BSD, Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows under the GNU GPL license.

• Now seemingly very stable, Pinta 2.0 is well on its way to becoming one of Linux’s favorite painting and editing applications out there.

• Pinta is a free cross-platform graphics editor, that means you can install it on Windows, macOS, or Linux. It is a hassle-free tool for all Linux users who do not want to struggle through documentation to master a more complicated graphics tool.

• The app is a perfect match for Viewers & Editors in the Design & Photo category. It puts all the common graphic editing and design tools at your disposal: paintbrush, paint can, cloning stamp, gradient, different selection types, etc.

Instructionals/Technical

• In this tutorial am going to show you how you can install Docker-CE on Ubuntu 20.04.

• Docker is a set of platform as a service product that uses OS-level virtualization to deliver software in packages called containers. Containers are usually isolated from one another and bundled their own software libraries and configuration files, they can communicate with each other through well-defined channels.

• Docker makes it possible to get more apps running on the same old servers and also makes it easy to package and ship programs.

• PlaySMS is a free and open source SMS management software, a web interface for SMS gateways and bulk SMS services. In this article we will configure PlaySMS on Debian 10 with NGINX web server and MariaDB Database. We will need PHP to run PlaySMS web application and Kannel SMS Gateway. To install Kannel SMS Gateway please check this article.

• MyBB is a open-source forum application which comes with amazing unique features which gives your forum a completely unbelievable look. It comes with many pre-installed features and utilities to keep your forum completely managed and solid. Since, It’s open source, There are many themes developed by the community members for you to use it freely, also there are many plugins which gives you and your forum users more accessibility to the forum. Plugins like Social Login Integration, ShoutBox, Arcade Gamers etc. It’s one of the most reliable free forums software on the market. Many known communities uses MyBB to this day

• PPLOG is a personal blog, a perl script, found in the menu under “Personal” category. I received an email that it doesn’t work.

• The right-click menu lists all possible outputs and allows changing the default; however, that is conflicting with Multiple Sound Card Wizard and upsetting pavucontrol.

• What comes to your mind when you hear about Linux? A hacker wearing a black hoodie and a Guy Fawkes mask, typing gibberish in the terminal on one screen, while the other screen flickers with code no one understands. What if we told you that you could do that too and “try” to look cool with your friends?

• All of that is done in a Shell program pre-installed in all Linux distributions. In this article, let’s look at what a Linux Shell is and its use in Linux.

• Cat command is used to read and print file content on a terminal screen. If you bifurcate concatenation, you will get a cat in between, which means you can combine multiple files at once. The cat command is not limited to reading files, and it can do more, let me show you how to leverage cat.

• WhatsApp is a cross-platform messaging service available for Android, iOS, Windows, and macOS. The unavailability of an official WhatsApp client for Linux has left users wondering whether or not they can use WhatsApp on a Linux desktop.

• The straightforward answer is yes. Although you have the choice to run WhatsApp on an Android emulator, there must be a better way, one not involving emulation. Therefore, in this article, we will discuss how you can use WhatsApp on Linux.

• Debian, which is a hugely popular Linux distribution, has given rise to a wide selection of popular Debian flavors. Among the most celebrated and hugely popular Debian flavors is MX Linux, which takes the first position in Distrowatch at the time of penning down this tutorial.

• MX Linux project is made possible by the collaborative efforts of AntiX and former MEPIS Linux communities. It is a desktop-oriented Linux flavor that provides XFCE as the default desktop environment – although you can get it in KDE Plasma and Fluxbox.

• MX Linux is a middleweight Linux distribution that combines a colorful and efficient desktop with rock-solid stability and superb performance. The latest stable version of MX Linux is MX Linux 21, codenamed Wildflower. It is based on Debian 11 Bullseye and ships with all the latest software updates and goodness for an amazing and elegant desktop distribution.

• In this guide, we will show you how to install MX Linux 21 step-by-step.

• This tutorial explains how you can install LibreOffice version 7.0 and later on an Ubuntu computer with several choices of installation methods namely AppImage, DEB, PPA, Snap and Flatpak sorted by difficulty from beginner to advanced. Thanks to these choices, you who have computer with GNU/Linux distros other than Ubuntu can also practice this. Now let’s install it.

• If you are using a minimal Debian 11 Bullseye server distro and want a lightweight Windows manager along with a low resource consuming display manager and desktop panel; then here is the tutorial to install OpenBox Window manager on minimal Debian 11 Linux distro using the command line.

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Apache on CentOS 9 Stream. For those of you who didn’t know, Apache, also known as Apache HTTP server is a free, open-source, and cross-platform HTTP server, including powerful features, and can be extended by a wide variety of modules. It is part of the LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) that powers much of the internet.

• This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of the Apache webserver on CentOS 9 Stream.

Wine or Emulation

• Haiku as the open-source operating system in development for two decades as the inspirational successor to BeOS is kicking off 2022 by…. beginning to be able to run Windows applications via Wine. There is great progress being made in porting Wine to running on Haiku.

• Developer “X512″ who has achieved a lot of other great Haiku development milestones from graphics driver porting to other work has been tackling Wine this week. He has been quickly making progress on being able to run Windows programs on the BeOS-inspired open-source operating system.

Games

• I have long stopped even checking ProtonDB to see if the games I’m interested in run well on Linux – I just assume that the games I’m into belong to the 80%, with the remaining 20% being the massive garbage pile that are abandoned indie games, anime nonsense, and porn that have infested Steam over the years.

• Proton, and all the work Wine, Valve, and open source developers have poured into it, is arguably one of the biggest contributions to desktop Linux in a long, long time, and with the Steam Deck on the horizon, it’s only going to get even better from here.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• Early in 2021 there was the inaugural release of LABWC as a stacking Wayland compositor that promoted itself as an alternative to Openbox. In kicking off the new year, LABWC 0.4 is now available.

• The LABWC Wayland compositor is built off the wlroots library and takes inspiration from Openbox while being focused on simplicity and speed while still having some nice window management features.

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• KDE developers ended out 2021 with more Wayland session fixes coming for the Plasma 5.24 release. There was also nice user feature work like KIO-using applications such as Dolphin now properly dealing with non-user-owned locations.

• KDE developer Nate Graham this morning published his usual weekly development summary of all the interesting changes going on in the KDE space. Some of the KDE changes for the final week of 2021 included:

• - The Dolphin file manager can now be launched as root or other non-user-owned locations. This is thanks to PolKit support being merged in KIO. KDE applications making use of KIO can now create/move/copy/trash/delete files in non-user-owned locations as of KDE Frameworks 5.90.

Distributions

New Releases

• Slackel 7.5 Openbox has been released. Slackel is based on Slackware and use salixtools from Salix.

• Includes the Linux kernel 5.15.12 and latest updates from Slackware’s ‘Current’ tree. Wicd has been removed. NetworkManager is the default app for connecting to networks now.

• The new version is available in 64-bit and 32-bit builds.

• The 64-bit iso image support booting on UEFI systems. Iso images are isohybrid. Iso images can be used as installation media.

• It is good to read the Slackel Startup Guide before install Slackel.

• Septor Linux is a operating system that provides users with a perfect computing environment for surfing the Internet anonymously. Septor providing users with a stable and reliable distribution that is based on Debian GNU/Linux and works on a wide range of computers. Distribution featuring a customised KDE Plasma desktop.

• Tor Browser, OnionShare (an anonymous file sharing utility) and qTox (an instant messaging client built on a “privacy goes first” agenda). Thunderbird, HexChat and QuiteRSS are all pre-configured to connect to the Internet via the Tor network. The distribution can be used in “live” mode or it can be installed to hard disk via the standard Debian installer.

Arch Family

• Arch Linux is no doubt one of the best distros for Linux power users. But there are some things you should know about Arch before installing it.

• When installing most Linux distros, you simply download the ISO, create a bootable media, and begin the installation process—no research required.

• But things are a little different with Arch Linux. If you jump right into the installation part without learning about the distro first, you’ll be dumbfounded by the complexity of the process. And that’s just the installation to speak of.

Devices/Embedded

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

• The PinePhone is an inexpensive Linux-friendly smartphone with a $150 starting price. And now you can turn it into a tiny Linux laptop thanks to a $50 keyboard accessory.

• It’s one of four new PinePhone accessories that are now available from the Pine Store.

• In addition to being able to run mobile Linux distributions, the PinePhone has a few other special features that are available when you remove the back cover of the phone. There are a set of hardware kill switches for disabling the mic, camera, or wireless features. And there are a set of pogo pins that allow you to connect other hardware.

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• Blender was originally a product of a Dutch animation studio by the name of NeoGeo. After blazing his way through continental Europe, co-founder Ton Roosendaal felt a need to raise the bar on the software that he and his team used to carry out their work.

• One of the things that helped Roosendaal find so much success at the helm of NeoGeo, even before Blender’s official inception was the proprietary 3D rendering and animation software that came before it, crafted for the company in-house under Roosendaal’s supervision.

• He was the catalyst force driving this new mission to totally revamp the platform that they were already using at the time. They got the ball rolling in 1995, but it took several years to accomplish what they had set out to do.

• What does 2022 hold for open source and OpenTelemetry? Which cutting-edge technologies should you be paying attention to in 2022? We asked the experts about their predictions for the coming year. Stay ahead of the curve and learn how to plan strategically in the new year.

• [...]

• With a focus on people from the UK Government we will see two things. Firstly, there will be a shift in education to embrace more on open source software, open hardware and open data, particularly around practical training. This will help the next generation of developers and other professionals enter the market with the right skills to participate in how companies today build their software and then manage it over time. This doesn’t just mean code, but all the jobs that exist around software development and that provide value to users.

• Secondly, there will be more focus on supporting home grown businesses in the tech space worldwide, which ultimately means those start-up and scale-up companies working around open technology.

• In the UK, this will manifest itself in increased investment from the Financial Services sector, the likes of Pension Funds which currently lag significantly behind those in the US in terms of investment in tech. There is increased understanding in that market around how to value companies and how they operate, which should support more companies in growing and being successful in the longer term.

• Open source developers of various open source cryptocurrency miners show what they say as proof that HiveOS modified code preventing compensation for vital development work. It was described that developers had previously implemented checks into a cryptocurrency miner to signal any modifications to the development address and to raise alarm. A private investigation was then performed which apparently shows proof that HiveOS is behind all of it.

FSF

Licensing/Legal

• Last week, TikTok quietly released a game-changing tool for gamers and live streamers in the form of a desktop-based streaming app called TikTok Live Studio. Turns out, TikTok’s app that will allow gamers and TikTokers to stream high-quality content from their PCs to their TikTok accounts appears to be based on OBS’s open-source software. Unfortunately, TikTok has already been accused of breaking OBS’s GPL, or General Public License, by not releasing its open source code for TikTok Live Studio.

• OBS’s business development manager Ben Torell told Protocol that OBS has “clear evidence” that TikTok’s Live Studio allegedly violated licensing terms. OBS has reached out to TikTok and is waiting to hear back.

Programming/Development

Java

• For the last few weeks, the world of computer security has been turned upside down as teams struggled to understand if they needed to worry about the Log4j vulnerability. The relatively small Java library didn’t do anything flashy, but it was a well-built open source tool for tracking software events, and that made it popular with Java developers. That meant it often found its way into corners that people didn’t expect.

• While the security teams will continue to debate the nature of the flaw itself and search for similar problems, many are wondering how this might change the industry’s reliance on open source practices. Everyone enjoys the free tools until a problem like this appears. Is there a deeper issue with open source development that brought this about? Can society continue to rely upon the bounty of open source without changing its expectations and responsibilities?

• VentureBeat talked to Brian Behlendorf to understand the depth of the problem and also try to make sense of how software developers can prevent another flaw like this from getting such wide distribution. Behlendorf was one of the original developers of the Apache web servers, and he’s long been a leader of open source development. He’s been working with the Linux Foundation and the Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF) to find better practices and support them throughout the open source ecosystem.

• Java is the fifth most used programming language worldwide in 2021, with a market share of 35.35%. Today, there are thousands of companies that use Java software development services for digital products and solutions. Among these, enterprise software is one of the most in-demand services for companies – and Java has been a primary part of the technology stack for developing these applications.

• This week’s Java roundup for December 20th, 2021, features news from OpenJDK with a new draft on value objects, JDK 18, JDK 19, Project Loom, additional statements from vendors on Log4Shell, numerous Spring and Quarkus updates, Hibernate ORM 6.0.0-M3, point releases from Apache Camel and Camel Quarkus, Apache Tika 2.2.1 and GraalVM Native Build Tools 0.9.9.

Leftovers

Science

• For psychologists who study it, disgust is one of the primal emotions that define — and explain — humanity.

Hardware

• First, when we talk about “leveling the bed” understand that what we really mean is tramming the print surface. 3D printers have been tacked to the walls or flipped upside down and still work fine. Being level to a table has nothing to do with their ability to print.

• When you level the bed on a 3D printer, you’re making sure that the nozzle is at the same height across the entire print surface. This allows the printer to lay down a perfect first layer and the foundation for a good print.

• If your printer didn’t come with a probe to auto level the bed for you, have no fear. It’s really not that hard.

• First, heat the nozzle and bed as if you’re setting up a print. Metal expands slightly when warm, so never calibrate a cold machine. Allow the printer to warm up for a few minutes.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• That dream started with cancer.

• [...]

• Specialists soon provided a name. The then-43-year-old had multiple myeloma, a relatively rare form of blood cancer that typically strikes people in their 70s. Back then, few lived longer than two years.

• She spent the next six months in America undergoing tandem stem cell transplants using her own healthy cells, while family and friends rallied so Paul and the kids could stay in Mexico. He traveled back and forth to be with her when she was sickest. Then she moved back to Mexico and traveled periodically to Houston for treatments. After months of that, they moved back to the United States.

Integrity/Availability

Proprietary

Security

• The free and popular password manager LastPass might be compromised. Its members reported multiple attempted logins by malicious actors who used the correct LastPass master password.

• Members are advised to enable two-factor authentication to secure their accounts.

• LastPass is popularly known as a reliable password manager and web browser extension. Its service also extends to smartphones via an app. Unfortunately, its good reputation is now being tested after members reported concerning issues about its interface.

• Cybersecurity is one of the important elements in the existing computer systems of all organizations in Industry 4.0. The rise in innovations of cutting-edge technologies like artificial intelligence, cloud computing, and machine learning has instigated organizations to adopt digital transformation to boost performance. But, this adoption can welcome a plethora of opportunities for cybercriminals to successfully achieve cyberattacks into the systems. Thus, aspiring techies, who want to join the cybersecurity field, have to try certain cybersecurity projects to gain sufficient knowledge of open source projects. There are innumerable open source projects on cybersecurity to gain confidence in this domain and earn a lucrative salary package per annum. Thus, let’s explore some of the top ten open source cybersecurity projects to try in 2022.

• [...]

• GNU Radio is one of the top ten open source projects on cybersecurity and software development toolkits to provide signal processing blocks for implementing software radios. Organizations can use this with readily-available low-cost external RF hardware for software-defined radio.

• [...]

• Google has launched the open-source cybersecurity project known as OpenTitan to secure chip design efficiently. This project will allow organizations to enhance the initial design and strengthen the security of the implementation of the chip. It can be used in data centres and infrastructures to build upon a trustworthy state.

• T-Mobile has suffered a data breach according to The T-Mo Report. While this breach appears to be on a smaller scale, the mobile company was hit with another, much larger-scale attack in August.

• Documents show that bad actors targeted user accounts and engaged in ‘unauthorized activity’ in the form of SIM swapping or spying of the user’s customer proprietary network information (CPNI).

• Chris Palmer discusses the nature and particulars of the OS limitations we face, what security gap they leave us with, and what we are doing to make Chromium’s large codebase less memory-unsafe.

Privacy/Surveillance

• The city’s plan to use smart streetlights to deliver free WiFi is causing alarm about who will own New Orleanians’s data.

Defence/Aggression

• Iraq’s interior minister dismissed Babylon province’s police chief on Friday and several officers were called for questioning following an operation that reportedly led to the deaths of 20 members of the same family.

• The operation, details of which remain unclear, took place Thursday when rapid intervention units and intelligence forces sought to storm a house in the village of Al-Rashayed in the central Iraqi province.

Environment

Wildlife/Nature

• A man who had been on a boogie board off the coast of central California died after he was apparently attacked by a shark near Morro Bay, the authorities said on Friday.

• The man, who the authorities did not identify, was found floating and unresponsive off Morro Strand State Beach at about 10:40 a.m. and was pronounced dead at the scene, according to a statement from California State Parks.

• [...]

• There were 57 unprovoked shark attacks worldwide in 2020 and 39 provoked attacks, resulting in 13 fatalities, according to the International Shark Attack File, another organization that tracks shark data, which is based at the Florida Museum of Natural History at the University of Florida.

Finance

• The externalities of unfettered money printing are extremely overweight to the negative side of the spectrum. When the government has the ability to work in conjunction with central banks to print money ex-nihilo to fund an activity, those who are in control of managing that activity are incentivized to be extremely wasteful to justify their budgets funded by the money printer. There is no greater example of this than the US military, which currently boasts an annual budget of $768.2B for 2022.

• The $846 million subsidy deal that North Carolina struck with Apple just topped the “year’s worst” list of a nonpartisan economic think tank. The Center for Economic Accountability selected the 39-year agreement to put Apple’s campus in Research Triangle Park as the “Worst Economic Development Deal of the Year,” saying that its annual $21 million cost to the state led the list of reasons.

• “A billion dollars is a lot of money for North Carolina’s taxpayers and communities, because that’s $1 billion worth of public services not being funded,” said John Mozena, CEA president. “But for a company like Apple, which reported more than $1 billion a day in revenues this past year, it isn’t anywhere near enough money to move the needle on a major site selection decision.”

• CEA opposes economic development subsidies in general, as a nonpartisan watchdog group promoting government transparency and free-market principles. In their report, researchers pointed out that North Carolina’s anticipated $21 million in annual lost tax revenue is more than the state spends on work force building programs like community college distance education.

• Embracing Bitcoin is a bold move and a great chance for countries like El Salvador, but the end doesn’t justify the means. Bitcoiners are being played for President Nayib Bukele’s power fantasies of a new Bitcoin City, whose original plans were downloaded from the internet. Bitcoin is non-political, therefore Bitcoiners shouldn’t get too close to politics. Educational communities like Bitcoin Beach and Bitcoin City SV are far more likely to achieve sustainable Bitcoin adoption than airdrops and the coercion to use custodial wallets.

• The United States has lost two industries of critical strategic importance: semiconductors and communications-infrastructure equipment. Only about 9% of the world’s semiconductor devices are currently produced in the US and no significant telecom-equipment manufacturers remain in that country.

• Different reasons are responsible for these losses, but government support will be required in both cases if the United States is to keep its industrial competitiveness.

• Since these industries were largely pioneered in the US, we should examine how this happened, and ask further how valid are concerns about America’s apparent loss of technological leadership.

Civil Rights/Policing

• An ISIS fanatic who chained up a five-year-old Yazidi girl in the sun and let her die of thirst as punishment for wetting the bed collapsed in a German court today after he was jailed for life for genocide.

Monopolies

Patents

• The European Patent Office is conducting a survey of European patent applicants, to assess the impact of the EPO’s strict novelty requirement on applicants’ disclosure and commercialisation strategies. In particular, the EPO wishes to assess what impact different grace period scenarios might have on the commercial behaviour of patent applicants. Other patent systems, notably that in the US, allow for grace periods, which proponents argue allow inventors to test their inventions in the marketplace before committing to the time and cost of filing patent applications. On the other hand, a strict novelty requirement for patentability can provide greater certainty to the patent granting process.

• The EPO has launched a user consultation on grace periods for patents, the results of which will be published in early 2022 (EPO press release). The EPC as it currently stands does not permit a grace period in which inventors may disclose their invention without prejudicing a future patent filing. Whilst this is not the first time the EPO has considered whether there would be any benefits to introducing a patent grace period, so far widespread support for introducing a grace period in Europe has always been lacking. EPO users are set-up for operating in a file-first, publish-after system, and few would welcome the legal uncertainty that a European grace period would introduce. Nonetheless, the EPO clearly believes that it is time once again time to take the temperature on their no-grace period approach.

• Legal Background: Grace Periods

• According to Article 54 EPC, the state of the art for determining novelty constitutes everything that was made available to the public before the priority date of the patent application, regardless of whether the applicant/inventor was responsible for the publication. By contrast, the US patent system retains a grace period for patent applications. In the US, disclosures made by an inventor (or someone who obtained the subject-matter from the inventor), up to 1 year from the priority date, do not constitute prior art for the patent (AIA 35 U.S.C. 102(b)(1)(A)). If the inventor has disclosed their invention during the grace period, then further disclosures by third parties also don’t constitute prior art (AIA 35 U.S.C. 102(b)(1)(B)).

Copyrights

• Each January 1st is Public Domain Day, where a new crop of works have their copyrights expire and become free to enjoy, share, and reuse for any purpose.

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