● 01.14.22

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 14/1/2022: FFmpeg 5.0 and Wine 7.0 RC6

Posted in News Roundup at 6:37 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxDistributionsDevices/EmbeddedFree Software/Open SourceLeftovers

GNU/Linux

Audiocasts/Shows

• Alex got some new devices for Christmas, and we set off to figure out how to integrate them into his network.

• Hackaday Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Managing Editor Tom Nardi are back again to talk about all the weird and wonderful stories from our corner of the tech world. Canon had to temporarily give up on chipping their ink cartridges due to part shortages, and that’s just too perfect to ignore. There’s also some good news for the International Space Station as the White House signals they’re ready to support the orbiting outpost until 2030.

Kernel Space

Graphics Stack

• Mesa’s V3D and V3DV drivers providing open-source OpenGL and Vulkan driver support, respectively, for newer Broadcom VideoCore hardware now has a double buffer mode implemented. This is a win for numerous workloads for these drivers most notably used by modern Raspberry Pi single board computers.

Applications

• Coming about nine months after the release of FFmpeg 4.4 “Rao”, FFmpeg 5.0 “Lorentz” is here to introduce several new encoders and decoders, such as the ADPCM IMA Westwood encoder, ADPCM IMA Acorn Replay decoder, Apple Graphics (SMC) encoder, MSN Siren decoder, GEM Raster image decoder, speex decoder, bitpacked encoder, as well as VideoToolbox ProRes encoder.

• New muxer and demuxers are present as well in this major release, including the AV1 Low overhead bitstream format muxer, Argonaut Games CVG demuxer, Argonaut Games CVG muxer, Westwood AUD muxer, and an experimental IMF demuxer.

• FFmpeg 5.0 is out today as a shiny feature update to this widely-used open-source audio/video handling suite.

Instructionals/Technical

• There might come a time where you can only access a remote server by logging in to an intermediate server (firewall/jump host) first. The server could be in a private or isolated network that is only reachable from the intermediate server. When accessing the server, you first need to ssh to the intermediate server before doing another ssh to the destination server. If there is another remote host that can only be accessible from the second server, the chain can be long.

• In this guide, we will learn how to simplify the process using the options that ssh client provides us including using the SSH ProxyCommand command.

• In this article you will learn how to install Jitsi Meet on Ubuntu 20.04.

• Jitsi Meet is a fully encrypted open source JavaScript WebRTC application used primarily for video conferencing. It incorporates voice, high-quality videoconferencing and instant messaging services with end-to-end encryption for secure communications.

• Today we are looking at how to enable a dark theme on your Chromebook. Please follow the video/audio guide as a tutorial where we explain the process step by step and use the commands below.

• In this post, you will learn how to Export Your Servers Logs with Rsyslog in Centos 8

• In this article, we’ll walk through setting up a CentOS/RHEL 8 Rsyslog daemon to deliver log messages to a remote Rsyslog server. This configuration ensures that disc space on your machine is available for other purposes.

• In CentOS 8, the Rsyslog daemon is already installed and operating by default. Issue the following commands to see if the rsyslog service is active on the system.

• CentOS Linux 8 was discontinued at the end of 2021. Check out more information about that in this in this article CentOS Linux 8 will end in 2021 and shifts focus to CentOS Stream.

• The team at CentOS decided to shift focus to CentOS stream, an upstream version of RHEL. CentOS stream places itself between Fedora Linux and RHEL. It is not 100% RHEL clone but ahead of RHEL development. Other distros that are 100% compatible with RHEL 8 have come up including Rocky Linux and Alma Linux.

• Apache Kafka and ZooKeeper is a distributed data store with optimization for ingesting and processing streaming data. Streaming data generated thousands. A streaming platform needs to handle this constant influx of data sequentially and incrementally process the data. Visit Apache Kafka’s site for more info. Also, try the tutorial Apache Kafka WebUI for those who want Web interface.

• In this post, you will learn how to install RoundCube Webmail on Ubuntu / Debian

• Roundcube is free open-source web-based email client written in PHP. We can access webmail client in our browser, meaning that instead of using Desktop based Web Clients we can access our mailbox in Browser. It has suppoprt for LAMP/LEMP Stack, We can import mails from mailboxes like Google,Yahoo etc. It has features like Message Filter, MIME Support, Spell Checking, Folder management etc.

• iptables is a powerful tool to help configure access to various ports on your computer or server. It provides the level of control that makes it possible to configure what network traffic is permitted or denied to the system.

• The main quirk about iptables is that, by default, the configurations for iptables will not persist after a reboot. After configuring your system’s iptables rules, there is one more important step thay you must do in order to make sure the rules are still there after a reboot.

• In this tutorial, you will see how to make iptables rules persistent after reboot on Ubuntu and CentOS based systems.

• If you are running an older version of Ubuntu, chances are you have either PHP 7.2 or 7.3 running. PHP 7.2 was originally released on November 30, 2017, and stopped receiving active support on November 30, 2019 meaning known security issues will not be fixed. It’s therefore important to upgrade.

• By default, older versions of Ubuntu have the packages for PHP 7.4, so here’s how to upgrade.

• PHP is by a long stretch, one of the most popular server-side programming languages in the market. It’s is ised by over 50% of all websites. Popular websites like WIkipedia, WordPress, Facebook, Magento, and Laravel are all written in PHP.

• PHP 8.0 is the latest major release of the PHP language. It introduces several breaking changes, performance improvements, and lots of new features such as named arguments, JIT compiler, union types, match expression, and more.

• This article will show you how to install PHP 8 on Ubuntu 20.04 and integrate it with Nginx and Apache. At the time of writing, the default Ubuntu 20.04 repositories include PHP 7.4 version. We’ll install PHP from the ondrej/php PPA repository.

• The Advanced package tool, commonly known as APT, is a application which allows for the management, installation and removal of software packages on Debian-based Linux distributions such as Ubuntu. Apt greatly simplifies the process of managing software applications on Debian Linux by automating the download and installation of software packages, from local or remote software repositories.

• APT is not a single command, rather it is a collection of tools distributed as package, which includes tools such as apt, apt-cache and apt-get.

• This is great for admins as it makes software management much easier – but what happens when it doesn’t work, and you get the “Apt Get – Command Not Found” message? This article looks at how you can troubleshoot the apt command.

• When you use Linux, you may hear people talking about POSIX compliance. What does that mean? This article will explain POSIX’s relation to Linux and the attempt to standardize operating systems.

• This document takes you through the basics of intrusion detection, the steps necessary to configure a host to run the snort network intrusion detection system, testing its operation, and alerting you to possible intrusion events.

• Snort is a software-based real-time network intrusion detection system developed by Martin Roesch that can be used to notify an administrator of a potential intrusion attempt. The ever-increasing amount of Internet crackers, armed with “ready-to-run” exploits, as well as the sophisticated attacker that’s intent on defacing your web page necessitates the use of a method to track their activity and alert you to this.

Wine or Emulation

• Wine 7.0 is inching towards release but for this week is the seventh weekly release candidate.

• Wine 7.0-rc6 is now available with another 47 bugs fixed. Among the games seeing fixes this week include Star Wars Episode 1 Racer, Saints Row: The Third, Microsoft Flight Simulator 2000, Deus Ex: Human Revolution, Sniper Elite 4, Lego Stunt Rally, FIFA 11, Guild Wars 2, World of Warcraft, and a variety of other new and old Windows games. There is also other software like MinGW’s GDB debugger, Homesite+, Logos 8 Bible Software, WeChat, PuTTY, and other applications seeing fixes.

Games

• Want to get a copy of Surviving Mars and plenty of extra content? Check out the Humble Surviving Mars Bundle. Plus, there’s a Winter Sale on at Humble. A really great city-builder and you can get the base game for next to nothing thanks to this!

• Something that still doesn’t quite feel right somehow is seeing the likes of a PlayStation logo on Linux. Anyway, the smash hit God of War is now on Steam and works right away on Linux. You can thank Steam Play Proton for that.

• It’s hard to believe the changing face of gaming sometimes. Previously console exclusive games now coming to PC more often. A trend I hope to see continue for years to come. Of course the new release comes with the kinds of things you would expect like enhanced graphics, ultra-wide support, NVIDIA DLSS, AMD FSR and so on.

• Valve has confirmed that its Steam Deck handheld gaming PC is on track to begin shipping in February, following a short delay. And Apple may be looking at a somewhat longer setback for the virtual reality/augmented reality glasses it’s reportedly been developing since 2015: originally expected to ship this year, they may not be ready until 2023.

• In other tech news, Google is rolling out a highly anticipated (and much needed) update for Pixel 6 phones that should bring a bunch of bug fixes, Google Voice continues to get less useful over time, and the Humble Choice game subscription membership is about to drop support for Linux and Mac games from the archives.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• If you use the Plasma desktop on your Linux, as you should, and you also happen to have an Android phone, then the most convenient way to pair the two and share data and whatnot is through the use of KDE Connect. This is a built-in application available in all the modern releases of the Plasma desktop, and it lets you easily pair and control your phones.

• I’ve tested the solution several times in the past, including an early release for Windows, and overall, the results were quite decent. Now, recently, I encountered a real usability problem as part of my Slimbook Pro adventures. For some odd reason, the computer wouldn’t mount the Nokia 5.3 phone using the MTP protocol, which corresponds to the “File Transfer” option when you connect an Android device via USB. No such problem with any other Android device, including an almost identical Nokia 5.4. So I decided to power on KDE Connect, and thus, this little review was born.

• It’s the start of a new year, which means some retrospective – let’s look at what happened in Calamares in 2021. Calamares is an independent Linux system installer. Independent in the sense that it is developed outside of any specific distribution, but it supports Arch derivatives, Debian, Fedora derivatives, and openSUSE derivatives. KDE Neon and KaOS. Probably Gentoo and Slackware and Nix, also, although I haven’t heard of any. Some day it will install FreeBSD, as well.

• Calamares was started in 2014, back then mostly by Teo, Anke, Aurélien, with a changing cast of characters. I can find over 100 different contributors in the git history.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from January 07 to January 14.

Distributions

New Releases

• I’ve released a new version of ExTiX Deepin today (220114). This ExTiX Build is based on Deepin 20.3 released by Deepin Technology 211123.

IBM/Red Hat/Fedora

• Here’s your weekly Fedora report. Read what happened this week and what’s coming up. Your contributions are welcome (see the end of the post)!

• I have weekly office hours on Wednesdays in the morning and afternoon (US/Eastern time) in #fedora-meeting-1. Drop by if you have any questions or comments about the schedule, Changes, elections, or anything else. See the upcoming meetings for more information.

Debian Family

• Pleroma has been updated to version 2.4.1. We also suffered some downtime during the 11th of January. Upgrading to the latest version fixed our issues.

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

• Canonical recently shared a few details about their plans for the upcoming Ubuntu 22.04 LTS operating system series regarding the GNOME and Linux kernel stacks.

• Due for release on April 21st, 2022, Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (Jammy Jellyfish) is currently under heavy development, and it will be Canonical’s next long-term supported (LTS) series, which will receive software and security updates for at least 5 years.

• Being an LTS series, Ubuntu 22.04 will be a more conservative release, like all previous Ubuntu LTS releases, which means that it won’t ship with bleeding-edge technologies, but stick to well tested ones instead.

Devices/Embedded

• iWave’s solderable, 45 x 45mm “i.MX 8M Plus OSM LGA Module” runs Linux on an NPU-equipped i.MX8M Plus. Highlights include up to 8GB LPDDR4, up to 256GB eMMC, WiFi/BT with optional 802.11ax, a -40 to 85°C range, and support for 2x GbE, 2x CAN-FD, and PCIe 3.0.

• iWave, which last March announced an iW-RainboW-G40M (i.MX 8M Plus SMARC SOM) module, has announced a much smaller module with the same NXP i.MX8M Plus SoC and the same iW-RainboW-G40M name. Fortunately, the new module is also referred to as the i.MX 8M Plus OSM LGA Module. The 45 x 45mm module adopts SGET’s recent Open Standard Module (OSM) v1.0 form factor for solderable, LGA packaged compute modules.

• There’s an amusing joke about some fish in a tank, idly wondering how they drive it. Build them an FOV (fish-operated vehicle), however, and it seems they do more than idly wonder – they actually drive the thing to actively seek out food. At least, that’s the conclusion of a paper in the February edition of Behavioural Brain Research, available on Science Direct and reported on the Raspberry Pi blog. Why that blog? Well, the computational brains behind the FOV is a Raspberry Pi 3B+.

• Created by researchers at Ben-Gurion University, Israel, the FOV consists of a life-support chamber (an aquarium half-full of water) towered over by a mast. On this mast are cameras, looking down at the fish below, and connected to the Pi 3 running motion detection software. Beneath the chassis are wheels, allowing the whole assembly to trundle around. There’s also a LIDAR sensor that reads the FOV’s surroundings, preventing the piscine perambulators from crashing.

• When a fish swims near one of the four tank walls, the camera picks up the movement, and the Pi directs the wheels to move the FOV in the appropriate direction. Fish being what they are, the movement can be a little erratic, but they soon learn to guide the FOV toward a pink patch on the wall, which nets them a tasty reward.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

SaaS/Back End/Databases

• A new maintainance version for temBoard 7 is just released. This 7.9 version includes PostgreSQL 14 support, bugfixes and performance improvements.

• temBoard is a monitoring and administration tool for PostgreSQL instances fleet. Its non-intrusive design eases deployment without weakening your PostgreSQL instance. temBoard alerts you, allows you to handle locks, bloat, configuration and more remotely.

• New version of OraDump-to-PostgreSQL has been released with the following improvements:

• improved migration of spatial data (SDO_GEOMETRY)

• SSL connection to PostgreSQL server is supported

• The pgAdmin Development Team is pleased to announce pgAdmin 4 version 6.4. This release of pgAdmin 4 includes 13 bug fixes and new features. For more details please see the release notes.

• pgAdmin is the leading Open Source graphical management tool for PostgreSQL. For more information, please see the website.

FSF

• We’re inviting you to a live session on January 20, starting at 14:00 EST (19:00 UTC), in the #fsf channel of the Libera.Chat IRC network. During this time, we’ll be having an impromptu discussion about our own free software journeys, and opening a convenient place for you to share your own with us. Although it’s not necessary to participate in the IRC session to submit your story to the campaign, we hope that you’ll take the time to join us! To access the story submission form, please visit the event page on Thursday, or any time over the following weekend.

• Each of us has our own story to share about how we came to free software. For some, it might have been something as simple as learning about it from a friend. Others may have come to GNU/Linux through an article online or in a magazine, and at least a few lucky members of our community will have grown up with free software being used in the home. As part of our Freedom Ladder initiative, we want to take the time to highlight these stories, and distill what we can from them in order to help more and more people join the free software movement. Our stories may differ widely, but we’re confident that we can learn something of value from each of them, and use them as tools to help lead others to freedom.

Leftovers

• [Handy Geng] lives in Baoding, China, where average winter temperatures can get as low as −7.7°C (18.1°F). Rather than simply freezing in the cold when using the bathroom, he decided he could do better. Thus came about his rather unique toilet paper heating system.

• The build uses a gas burner heating up a wok. Toilet paper is fed into the wok body via motorized rollers salvaged from what appears to be an old counterfeit money detector. The wok is then shaken by a second motor in order to more evenly heat the toilet paper within. The burner can then be turned off, and the lid of the wok opened in order to gain access to the toasty toilet paper.

Hardware

• When Star Trek: Voyager was in the development phase, concept art was created for a new style of tricorder to be used by the crew of the titular starship. But as it often the case with a younger sibling, the show ended up having to largely make do with the hand-me-down props from Star Trek: The Next Generation, which had recently finished its TV run.

• Trek aficionado [Mangy_Dog] completed a jaw-dropping recreation of this unused tricorder design back in 2019, but unable to leave well enough alone, he’s recently completed a second version that truly raises the bar for fan replicas. It’s not hyperbole to say that the prop he’s created is of a far higher quality and fidelity than anything they would have had during the actual filming of the show.

• Now you might be thinking that building the second version of the tricorder was easier than the first, and indeed, [Mangy_Dog] learned some important lessons from the earlier build. But that’s not to say that construction of this new replica, which was actually done on commission, went off without a hitch. In fact, he almost immediately ran into a serious problem. When he attempted to order a new display from Nextion, he found the quality had dropped significantly from the ones he’d used previously. The viewing angles and color reproduction were abysmal, so he was forced to go back to the drawing board and not only find a new display, but a completely new graphics chip to talk to it.

• Last time we talked about how Marlin has several bed leveling mechanisms including unified bed leveling or UBL. UBL tries to be all things to all people and has provisions to create dense meshes that model your bed and provides ways for you to adjust and edit those meshes.

• We talked about how to get your printer ready for UBL last time, but not how to use it while printing. For that, you’ll need to create at least one mesh and activate it in your startup code. You will also want to correctly set your Z height to make everything work well.

Integrity/Availability

Proprietary

Security

• Tech giants and federal agencies will meet at the White House on Thursday to discuss open-source software security, a response to the widespread Log4j vulnerability that’s worrying industry and cyber leaders.

• Among the attendees are companies like Apple, Facebook and Google, as well as the Apache Software Foundation, which builds Log4j, a ubiquitous open-source logging framework for websites.

• Lots of people “run Linux” without really knowing or caring – many home routers, navigational aids, webcams and other IoT devices are based on it; the majority of the world’s mobile phones run a Linux-derived variant called Android; and many, if not most, of the ready-to-go cloud services out there rely on Linux to host your content.

• But plenty of users and sysadmins don’t just “use Linux”, they’re responsible for hundreds, thousands, perhaps even millions of other people’s desktops, laptops and servers on which Linux is running.

• Those sysadmins are usually responsible not merely for ensuring that the systems under their jurisdiction are running reliably, but also for keeping them as safe and secure as they can.

• Lumen is an independent and one-of-a-kind research project at Harvard University’s Berkman Klein Center, studying cease and desist letters concerning online content. We collect and analyze requests to remove material from the web. Our goals are to educate the public, to facilitate research about the different kinds of complaints and requests for removal–both legitimate and questionable–that are being sent to Internet publishers and service providers, and to provide as much transparency as possible about the “ecology” of such notices, in terms of who is sending them and why, and to what effect.

Environment

Wildlife/Nature

• The last common ancestor of cephalopods and vertebrates existed more than 500 million years ago. In fact, a squid is more closely related to a clam than it is a to a person. Even so, the two lineages independently evolved camera-lens-style eyes with very similar features: a single lens in the front and a cup-shaped, image-sensing retina in the back.

• The similarity has had scientists wondering for decades how squid and their cousins get their eyes. In research published this week in BMC Biology, a Harvard lab moves closer to unraveling the mystery.

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