● 01.18.22

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 18/1/2022: Deepin 20.4 and Qubes OS 4.1.0 RC4

Posted in News Roundup at 2:21 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxDistributionsDevices/EmbeddedFree Software/Open SourceLeftovers

GNU/Linux

Kernel Space

• The Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) that integrates with Fwupd for delivering firmware updates primarily to Linux users is surging with around three times the normal traffic volume. Unfortunately, this boost in traffic appears to be due to vendor(s) releasing new system firmware updates ahead of disclosing a presumptive security issue.

• Back in November memory folios were merged into Linux 5.16 as a fundamental change to the memory management code. Now for Linux 5.17 there are improvements for folios merged and then out likely for Linux 5.18 is introducing the notion of large folios.

• Linux’s memory folios is designed to let file-systems and the page cache manage memory in chunks larger than the default page size. With Linux 5.16 the core memory management and page cache changes landed for supporting folios. Most benchmarks of folios put the performance benefit in the 0~10% region.

• A change merged overnight with the libata subsystem updates for Linux 5.17 means that some older AMD hardware will be able to boot quicker by avoiding an otherwise mandated sleep period.

• Merged this morning were the ATA subsystem updates for Linux 5.17. Usually the ATA changes don’t amount to many noteworthy changes but “Add support for AMD A85 FCH (Hudson D4) AHCI adapters” got my attention… Yeah, the chipset from the early AMD “Fusion” APU days.

Graphics Stack

• At the end of last year AMD introduced OpenGL sparse texture support into its RadeonSI Gallium3D driver. This functionality for Vega GPUs and newer flipped on ARB_sparse_texture support while now with the very latest Mesa 22.0-devel code ARB_sparse_texture2 is now flipped on too.

• ARB_sparse_texture2 updates OpenGL’s sparse texture support with further additions by NVIDIA. ARB_sparse_texture2 adds new built-in GLSL texture lookup functions, changes the behavior around reads from uncommitted texture memory, specifies standard virtual page sizes for internal formats used by sparse textures, and support for creating sparse multi-sample and multi-sample array textures.

• NVIDIA has released CUDA 11.6 as the latest version of their widely used but proprietary GPU compute stack. With CUDA 11.6 there are some good improvements and new features in store.

• CUDA 11.6 has numerous changes for advancing the NVIDIA compute stack including the convenient “-arch=native” compiler option (similar to “-march=native” with classic system code compilers), beginning to make use of the GPU System Processor driver code path by default on capable hardware, various performance optimizations, and other updates.

Applications

• Want to check your laptop battery status in Ubuntu or other Linux? There’s a small indicator applet that can do the job in GNOME desktop.

• “Battery Status” is the free and open-source indicator applet developed by Lorenzo Carbonell, a software developer behind touchpad-indicator and my weather indicator.

• It displays an icon on GNOME top bar in system tray area, along with the battery remaining time. By clicking on the applet, it shows battery percentage based on both current and original maximum capacities.

Instructionals/Technical

• A fascinating thing about humans is that we each have a particular learning style. Some people prefer to read about how something’s done. Some people prefer to follow instructions from the start, while others prefer to get an overview before engaging. Other people like to listen to instructions from an instructor or a podcast. And yet another group wants instructions in the form of a video.

• The trouble with video is that it can be difficult to produce and compress, and it is a lot of work to change once it’s done. And besides that, viewers can’t copy and paste Linux commands out of a video into their terminal.

• [...]

• The script and scriptreplay commands allow you to record a terminal session and then play it back later. There’s no video involved. Instead, plain text files called typescripts are used, so the files are small and users can copy commands during playback.

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Neos CMS on AlmaLinux 8. For those of you who didn’t know, Neos CMS is a free and open-source Content Management System (CMS). Neos offers a rich set of features such as inline editing, supports multiple websites on a single installation, built-in SEO tools, human-readable URLs, plugin manager, device preview, and supports multiple templates.

• 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 Neos Open Source Content Application Framework on an AlmaLinux 8. You can follow the same instructions for Fedora, RHEL, CentOS, and Rocky Linux distributions.

• Composer is a dependency manager for PHP that allows you to download and install all the required PHP packages needed for your project. It is a command-line tool that installs all libraries and dependencies for your project from the packagist.org repository. It is used in modern PHP frameworks such as Laravel, Symfony, Drupal, and Magento 2. In this post, we will show you how to install and use Composer on Alma Linux 8.

• One of the most basic operations you’ll need to conduct on a Linux system is moving files and folders. You can move or transfer files using the given GUI in any system, but you might be curious if the terminal has a command that allows you to swiftly move files to different directories.

• The mv command is what you’re looking for, and it’s simple to use because of its short and straightforward syntax. In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to move files with the mv command.

• This tutorial is a basic guide for GNU PSPP. Divided into three exercises, we hope this will be sufficient for beginners to understand the basics. Now let’s start PSPP!

• Here in this article, we learned the simple steps and commands to install a graphical user interface (GUI) to manage FirewallD on either Alamlinux or Rocky Linux 8. However, the steps are the same for CentOS, Redhat, Oracle Linux, and other RPM-based distros.

• FirewallD is a command-line tool to provide a system firewall feature to protect Linux unwanted access by disabling and enabling ports and services access to outside or local networks. However, if you are using a Graphical interface user then the command line may seem a little bit difficult to use. Therefore, to make things easy we can use GUI tools available to manage FirewallD such as one from firewall-config or Plasma firewall

• Rocky Linux is a Linux distribution that is intended to be a downstream, complete binary-compatible release using the Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating system source code. The project’s aim is to provide a community-supported, production-grade enterprise operating system.

• Before 2021, CentOS was regarded as an enterprise-stable, production-ready operating system that had been cloned from Red Hat Enterprise Linux. It had a few tweaks to set it apart from RHEL, but essentially, it was RHEL without the cost of a subscription.

• That was the “old” CentOS. The “new” CentOS, aptly called CentOS Stream, will take a similar approach to Fedora, which acts as an upstream source for RHEL. This means that new features will be introduced into CentOS Stream, where the bugs are worked out, and ultimately the new updates trickle down to RHEL.

• Coming from Debian or Ubuntu and interested in building C or C++ software programs on openSUSE? You’ll probably frantically search for a way to install package build-essential on openSUSE. Only to realize that this package does not exist on openSUSE. No worries though, because openSUSE offers an alternative and equivalent approach to installing package build-essential. This tutorial shows you how.

• There are two approaches to achieving your MySQL database administration goals. One is through a command-line client and the other one is via a graphical user interface. Both of these two approaches are evident with MySQL.

• Most users rely on phpMyAdmin to administer and manage their MySQL databases. However, the GUI spectrum of phpMyAdmin does not match the graphical tools MySQL Workbench has to offer.

• The MySQL Workbench database management tool is unmatched in its execution of database visual designs. Also, MySQL workbench has a dynamic user platform from database administrators, database architects, to database developers.

• In this article we will see how to create an IAM Role. Before proceeding, I assume that you are familiar with the basics of Terraform and AWS IAM Roles. If you want to learn more about IAM Roles then click here. In this article we will create a role and assign it administrator’s permissions.

• Hello Techies, as we know that root is the admin user in Linux who has all rights on all commands and files. It is not recommended to use root user to perform administrative tasks but assign administrative privileges to a local user via sudo. An ordinary user who has admin rights is known as ‘sudo user’.

• In this post, we will learn how to create a new sudo user on Ubuntu and Debian Linux. Let’s assume we want to create user with name ‘sysops’ name.

• In this post, we will learn how to create a new sudo user on Ubuntu and Debian Linux. A sudo user is an ordinary user which can perform administrative tasks.

Games

• Valve continues to tweak more of their games ahead of the Steam Deck release in February and their focus now appears to be on CS:GO with a fresh update out.

• A few more Steam Input improvements came for controllers, with their newer “FlickStick” mode enabled in the game options instead of the Steam Input Configurator and there’s also refinements to the behaviour. For those not aware, FlickStick created by Jibb Smart is in essence a quick way to turn to face any direction in a game, allowing you to be more accurate and speedy with gamepad sticks. Valve added support for it to Steam Input directly in 2021, now it has better native support in CS:GO.

• The Greatest Penguin Heist of All Time developers That Fish / That Other Fish have announced their Early Access game seems to be doing reasonably well. Released back in July 2021, it’s recently hit over 25,000 sales.

• “The Greatest Penguin Heist of All Time is the one and only 4 player CO-OP physics-based heist game featuring a bunch of kleptomanic penguins. You’ll experience a blend of physics-based platforming with stealth, strategy, and action. You have full freedom to achieve the missions in your own way.”

• March 8 will bring more puzzle / escape room antics with Mad Experiments 2: Escape Room from PlayTogether Studio.

• “Trapped in Professor Cheshire’s mysterious mansion, players will have to explore and cooperate to get out of the rooms in the allotted time. Each room has its own secrets, puzzles… and story bits on Hildegarde and Professor Cheshire Learn more about Hildegarde’s journey at the Cheshire Institute. From the library to the secret room to the dormitory, meet new characters, secrets, challenges, and strange events. Will Hildegarde find a way to escape? And will you?”

• Cowleyfornia Studios, developer of Sarawak have recently announced their next story-based adventure game with We’ll always have Paris. This will be an emotional one about loving someone with dementia. Much like the previous game, it will support Linux as the engine was developed on Linux.

• “This is the story of Simon Smith, a retired chef who lives with Claire, his wife of fifty years. Claire is slowly losing her memory, and Simon must balance his love for her with his desire to maintain normality and autonomy over the confusion that is infiltrating both their lives.”

• Creating a custom interface is one of the most exciting aspects of creating a retro gaming system with the Raspberry Pi. Tons of themes and original UIs have emerged over the years, but Neil, from YouTube channel RMC – The Cave, has taken things to the next level by creating a retro game shop replica as part of his retro games museum that functions as a front end for his emulation platform.

• Instead of selecting a game from a menu on the screen, users choose a game from the physical store shelves and scan it using a barcode scanner. Once a game is selected, it will automatically load for the user to play. The glue that makes all of this work, is a Raspberry Pi 3B and a little Linux magic.

• Ys IX: Monstrum Nox from developers Nihon Falcom, PH3 GmbH, Engine Software and publisher NIS America, Inc. has released an update to get the game ready for the Steam Deck. There’s no native port here though, it continues to rely on the Steam Play Proton compatibility layer.

• Released on Steam back in July 2021, the latest update version 1.1.2 brings with it local co-op and some improvements to the aspect ratio support.

• With Valve’s latest store updates experiment that’s ongoing, they gave a new look to Store Hubs for all the various tags and they just release an update with plenty of tweaks.

• Steam Labs Experiment 13 that was announced back in December gave the same refresh that other parts of Steam had seen, to upgrade the browsing experience with more information and to better make use of all the data they have. More personalization, items from your wishlist and more.

• Between 2022-01-11 and 2022-01-18 there were 22 new games released on Steam with Linux clients. For reference, during the same time, there were 235 games released for Windows on Steam, so the Linux versions represent about 9.4 % of total released titles.

• The original Game Boy was the greatest selling handheld video game system of all time, only to be surpassed by one of its successors. It still retains the #2 position by a wide margin, but even so, they’re getting along in years now and finding one in perfect working condition might be harder than you think. What’s more likely is you find one that’s missing components, has a malfunctioning screen, or has had its electronics corroded by the battery acid from a decades-old set of AAs.

• That latter situation is where [Taylor] found himself and decided on performing a full restoration on this classic. To get started, he removed all of the components from the damaged area so he could see the paths of the traces. After doing some cleaning of the damage and removing the solder mask, he used 30 gauge wire to bridge the damaged parts of the PCB before repopulating all of the parts back to their rightful locations. A few needed to be replaced, but in the end the Game Boy was restored to its former 90s glory.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• We give you a getting started guide with KDE Plasma desktop in this comprehensive article.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• Now, this isn’t a fully detailed, commit-by-commit or blow-by-blow rundown of everything that’s been updated, upgraded, or even just tickled lightly under its hin. Nor is this a fancy showcase of the best new features in GNOME 42 — it’s way too early for that.

• What this post is, is a quick overview of the most visible user-facing changes.

Distributions

New Releases

• There are a bunch of changes and visual improvements that make Deepin 20.4 a wonderful Linux distribution. Here’s what’s new!

• Deepin is a Chinese-made Linux distribution that caters to the average desktop user. It is a popular choice among users who want a beautiful Linux while being stable. The distro is so polished and has so many in-house developed apps that one forgets this is a Debian-based Linux distribution.

• The Deepin Desktop Environment, or DDE for short, is one of the best-looking Linux desktop environments out there. In fact, Deepin is now a fashion in computing ready to compete with Windows 11 and macOS. DDE is just gorgeous and without exaggeration, we can say that it is a work of art.

• Now with version 20.4 out it is time to have a fresh look and see how it matured.

• Deepin 20.4 is here almost two months after Deepin 20.3 and brings updated kernels and various other improvements, as well as bug and security fixes.

• The distribution now ships with both Linux 5.10.83 LTS and Linux 5.15.6 LTS kernels, but the former is used by default for new installations, though you can easily select the latter from the advanced options of the boot menu.

• Deepin 20.4 is now available for download. Deepin 20.4 is here with tons of new improvements and features like updated kernels. Deepin 20.4 is the fourth maintenance update to the latest Deepin 20 series.

• 深度操作系统（deepin）是一个致力于为全球用户提供美观易用、安全稳定服务的Linux发行版，同时也一直是排名最高的来自中国团队研发的Linux发行版。（了解deepin国际排名）

• 深度操作系统20.4同步上游内核版本，升级LTS内核至5.10.83，Stable内核至5.15.6，进一步提升兼容性。修复系统安全漏洞，增强安全性。从功能层面社区积极响应了用户反馈问题，开发并集成了大量实用功能，以便为用户带来更好体验。

• The fourth release candidate for Qubes 4.1.0 is here! There are no major changes to report. We’ve just focused on fixing bugs that were discovered and reported in the third release candidate.

• If you’re currently using any Qubes 4.1.0 release candidate, a regular update is sufficient to upgrade to the latest one. Otherwise, read on for more about how to get started with testing Qubes 4.1.0-rc4.

• This version of Parted Magic updates to Linux 5.16.1 and fixes a few minor problems with the Secure Erase and NVME Secure Erase programs.

• Manufacturers are starting to get a bit carried away with the length of names given to drives. The names are now limited to 15 characters, so the Secure Erase GUI should now fit well on everybody’s screen. If there is still any doubt to what drive is what, do a mouse over and the entire name will be shown in the tool tip.

SUSE/OpenSUSE

• As you may know, YaST is not only a control center for (open)SUSE Linux distributions, but it is also the installer. And, in that regard, we think it is a competent installer. However, time goes by, and YaST shows its age in a few aspects.

• During summer 2021, the team discussed how YaST should look in the near future.

• The call for papers for openSUSE Conference 2022 is open!

• The call for papers is open until April 14. This leaves a less than 90 days to submit a proposal. The dates of the conference are scheduled for June 2 – 4. The organizing team is preparing for a hybrid conference involving both virtual talks and live talks from the Z-Bau in Nuremberg, Germany. Registration for the conference has also begun.

• Since the close of the NeuVector acquisition three months ago, SUSE worked through the technical and legal considerations involved in open sourcing our eponymous cloud-native container security platform. NeuVector is an industry-leading security and compliance solution adopted by leading companies around the world. Open sourcing the NeuVector codebase not only makes NeuVector the technology of choice for the open source community, it also provides an even greater level of assurance to customers in highly regulated industries including government and federal customers, which is critical for proving a product they can trust and rely on.

• The eventual solution, which comprised a 7-region national scale cloud, is primarily being used for disaster detection and prevention and has all workloads orchestrated via Kubernetes, using SUSE Rancher. The solution was deployed seamlessly, on-time, and under budget as a result of open source components working together. Most importantly, the end result is the solid infrastructure backbone enabling the Indonesian Government to tackle the crisis effectively.

Slackware Family

• Based on Slackware64-current.

• After the 3rd release candidate by Slackware, Absoute has ditched spacefm/udevil — switching to qtfm/udisks2 (still no gvfs). Spacefm seems to have been abandoned and I was beginning to have issues with devil.

IBM/Red Hat/Fedora

• Last summer we released the public beta of the Resource Optimization service. During public beta, we received a lot of feedback from customers, which we used to enhance Resource Optimization in several areas. We are now announcing that this service is generally available for our Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) customers.

• Companies are pushing data closer and closer to the edge to meet the demands of users who are increasingly sensitive to delays in application responsiveness. These changes to the way data is delivered and consumed presents challenges to IT organizations. In this post we’ll talk about how an organization can provide optimum uptime while also delivering data as quickly as possible.

• An Application Delivery Controller (ADC) is one solution, but it often relies on expensive software and hardware to direct network traffic to available resources across datacenters. In addition to the traditional DNS infrastructure, an ADC solution often employs Global Server Load Balancing (GSLB) to dynamically reply to a Domain Name System (DNS) query with the IP address of the closest, or healthiest, server.

• Beyond the monetary cost of maintaining two separate DNS solutions, an ADC introduces another layer of complexity to a network.

• Of the many technologies with the potential to deliver significant value in the near future, Artificial Intelligence (AI) seems firmly planted atop the list for CIOs. Indeed, nearly all (95 percent) of the CIOs, CTOs, and technology leaders surveyed by IEEE agreed that AI will drive the majority of innovation across almost every industry sector in the next one to five years.

• “In 2022, expect AI engagements to become larger, more strategically significant, and more mission-critical – with a focus on long-term scalability.”

• Since around 2010, the “future of work” has been a leading topic for business leaders, entrepreneurs, and employees. A key question has been how emerging technologies such as AI, robotics, and smart machines will affect humans in the workforce.

• Then COVID-19 struck.

• Seemingly overnight, orderly debates about the future of work morphed into chaotic discussions about the “present of work:” Specifically, could employees work securely using mature technologies like video conferencing, mobile telephony, and cloud computing services?

• Forced to shut down their physical offices, corporations resorted to work models predicated on what futurist Carmen Alfonso Rica called a “massive, forced adoption of remote working.”

• The Mindshare Committee is establishing a Quarterly Report, with this post being our first edition. It covers activities from the Mindshare Committee and related teams for the months of October, November, and December of 2021. As we kick off these reports, we welcome feedback on how we can improve in the related Mindshare ticket.

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

• Linux Mint 20.3 release brings in several improvements. However, it is powered by Linux Kernel 5.4 LTS.

• So, users with newer hardware may find it troublesome to boot or run into other incompatibility issues with an older Linux Kernel.

• Fortunately, Linux Mint 20.3 now has an Edge ISO featuring Linux Kernel 5.13.0-25.

Devices/Embedded

• Pine64 is now accepting preorders for the PinePhone Pro, billed as the “fastest mainline Linux smartphone on the market”.

• Successor to the original PinePhone from 2019, the PinePhone Pro is designed to fill a gap in the market for a Linux-based smartphone with sufficient raw power to compete with iOS and Android alternatives.

• The device is also set apart by its swappable backplate, under which is found a removable battery, SD card slot and privacy switches that let the user cut access to the cameras, microphone, Wi-Fi and more.

• Nexcom’s IP67 protected “ATC 3530” in-vehicle and V2X computer runs Nexcom Aided Linux (NAL) on an up to 21-TOPS Jetson Xavier NX and offers a choice of 4x GbE with PoE or 4x MIPI-CSI-2 SerDes camera connections with V-By-One support.

• Nexcom announced a compact, rugged, AI-enabled edge AI system designed primarily for in-vehicle and vehicle-related applications including vehicle-to-everything (V2X). The ATC 3530 also supports M-to-M, X2X, ANPR (automatic number-plate recognition), car recognition, AIoT gateways and nodes, industrial systems, and “cloud-edge AI over mesh wireless” applications. The ATC 3530, which updates an earlier, Jetson TX2 based ATC 3200 system for ADAS, supplies an in-house, Ubuntu 18.04 based Nexcom Aided Linux (NAL) stack with Nvidia Jetpack 4.5 integrations that runs on Nvidia’s Jetson Xavier NX module.

• Raspberry Pi RP2040 microcontroller has been available for one dollar in single quantities for about half a year, with at the time, 500- and 3400-pieces reel pricing to be determined.

• But Raspberry Pi Trading has now started to sell the chip in bulk with reels of 3,400 and 500 pieces directly to businesses for a unit price of respectively 70 and 80 cents via the new Raspberry Pi Direct website. Distributors have been selling reels for a while, but closer to 85 cents to 95 cents per unit.

Open Hardware/Modding

• For wearable devices, attaching them to an arm or leg can be an annoying process since the straps used often have complicated tightening/locking mechanisms. This is what inspired one Instructables user who goes by The Puma to create the AutoStrap, a self-tightening strap system for wearable electronics similar to Marty McFly’s power-lacing shoes in Back to the Future.

• This year, Arduino Day is becoming Arduino Week. Taking place on 21-26 March, 2022, we’ll have more talks, events and presentations than ever before.

• Naturally you can expect the usual excitement from the annual Arduino festival. From makers to education and industry, we’ll be bringing you the biggest and the best Arduino has to offer. But there’s also a strong focus on community for the first week-long event. And that means we want to hear from you.

• Most plotters are planar, meaning they move in a single plane — though they often have the ability to move the tool up and down in the third axis. But if you convert one axis of the drawing plane into rotation, you get cylindrical plotting. That is how the rotary axis on a CNC machine works. If the tool moves in a third axis, you can even do conical plots. That’s exactly how CylinDraw makes it possible to plot directly onto cups and glasses.

• CylinDraw is an open source “cup-specific” plotter and engraver. It is a 2.5 axis machine with a rotary axis, similar to the famous EggBot egg plotter. Except instead of drawing onto the elliptical (in cross section) surface of an egg, CylinDraw plots onto the straight or sloped surface of cups, bottles, and similar objects. By equipping a Dremel or other rotary tool, you can also engrave onto a surface instead of drawing. If you do draw, the software also lets you swap pens to get a full color palette.

• The Arudino is a powerful platform for interfacing with the real world, but it isn’t without limits. One of those hard limits, even for the Arduino MEGA, is a finite number of pins that the microcontroller can use to interface with the real world. If you’re looking to extend the platform’s reach in one of your own projects, though, there are a couple of options available. This project from [Bill] shows us one of those options by using the ATtiny85 to offload some of an Arduino’s tasks using I2C.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• Padloc is a dead-simple password manager app for users who want to get the job done without any distractions and clutter.

• Padloc is a free, open-source solution but also offers a web service that helps the user to sync and store their passwords and keys in an encrypted web vault for a fee.

• Users also can download and install the app on their machine and sync up to 50 passwords, credit cards info, and login credentials, with up to 2 connected devices.

• However, the project itself is an open-source project that is licensed under GPL-3.0 License, which means you can install its component and run your server.

• The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), the all-volunteer developers, stewards, and incubators of more than 350 Open Source projects and initiatives, announced today Apache® Hop™ as a Top-Level Project (TLP).

• Apache Hop —the Hop Orchestration Platform— is a flexible, metadata-infused data orchestration, engineering, and integration platform. The project originated more than two decades ago as the Extract-Transform-Load (ETL) platform Kettle (Pentaho Data Integration), was refactored over several years, and entered the Apache Incubator in September 2020.

• “We are pleased to successfully adopt ‘the Apache Way’ and graduate from the Apache Incubator,” said Bart Maertens, Vice President of Apache Hop. “Apache Hop enables people of all skill levels to build powerful and scalable data solutions without the need to write code. As an Apache Top-Level Project, Hop is developed and used by people across the globe. Hop’s full project life cycle support helps these data teams to successfully build, test and run their projects in ways that would otherwise be hard or impossible to do.”

• QtPass is an open-source, free password manager GUI for the standard Unix password manager “pass” application.

• The “pass” password manager is a command-line open-source feature-rich application that follows Unix’s philosophy.

• Around this time of year people often wonder about their career trajectories and think about goals for the new year. If you’re the creator and/or maintainer of an open source project, you might also be wondering if now is the time to make your part-time open source project a full-time job or continue working on it in your spare time.

• Hearing from other entrepreneurs can be useful in making this kind of decision, but when asked how to determine if something is ripe to go from side hustle to business, the entrepreneurs I spoke with often responded with a version of, “I wish I knew.”

• That’s because whether or not an open source project might be monetizable is one question, whereas whether or not a particular person is going to be able to pull off that shift — and whether that is the best career move at the time, for that person — is another entirely.

• There is a new drop-in replacement for Elasticsearch, at least if you don’t mind the limitations and the alpha status. However, it definitely lives up to the promise that it provides an Elasticsearch-compatible API for data ingestion. I tested it with the elasticsearch-http() destination of syslog-ng, and it worked perfectly after I modified the URL in the configuration example I found. So, what is Zinc? It is a search engine written in Go that provides an Elasticsearch-compatible API for data ingestion. You cannot use Kibana with it, only its own web interface. If you are not into graphs and dashboards, and want to search text messages, then it is perfect. The application itself is a single binary and it does not have any external dependencies. It is lightweight and easy to configure, as practically there are no configuration options at all. Note: Zinc is still in alpha state. There are no guarantees that later versions will be compatible at any level. Error messages can sometimes be cryptic and you might run into unexpected behavior.

Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra

• The LibreOffice Quality Assurance ( QA ) Team is happy to announce LibreOffice 7.3 RC2 is available for testing!

• LibreOffice 7.3 will be released as final at the beginning of February, 2022 ( Check the Release Plan for more information ) being LibreOffice 7.3 RC2 the forth and last pre-release since the development of version 7.3 started in mid June, 2021. Since the previous release, LibreOffice 7.3 RC1, 117 commits have been submitted to the code repository and 65 issues got fixed. Check the release notes to find the new features included in this version of LibreOffice.

• Many OpenOffice users are seeing warnings when trying to access files in the OpenDocument Format (eg .odt, .ods).

Programming/Development

• Krita 3 and later are compatible with G’MIC, an open-source digital image processing framework. This support is provided by G’MIC-Qt, a Qt-based frontend for G’MIC. Since its inception, G’MIC-Qt was shipped as a standalone, externally built executable that is an optional, runtime dependency of Krita.

• Krita 5 changes the way G’MIC-Qt is consumed. In order to support CentOS and macOS, G’MIC-Qt has been converted into a dynamically loadable library that is a dependent of Krita.

• This file reviews these changes, and how to package Krita accordingly.

• Clipboard use on desktop platforms is ubiquitous. Most people use it without thinking. Copy, Paste, and Cut keyboard strokes are in-grained into muscle memory. On the web, it can present security issues as someone could read or write to your clipboard without you knowing.

• Up until now, Qt for WebAssembly’s clipboard was text-only and only within the app itself. Qt 6.3 will have better clipboard support between host and app but also adds copy/pasting of images.

• In my previous post, the history and general architecture of the new Qt Quick Compiler technology was explained. As promised there, the performance numbers are presented in this post.

• Many of you have been raising the question: when will Qt provide a full framework to monetize my Qt-based cross-platform application, implementing an advertising campaign directly on my user interface?

• Now all the community and Qt users in general can start in no time implementing and managing advertising campaigns targeting cross-platform use cases. We are excited to announce that Qt Digital Advertising 1.0 has been released!

• The Qt Company this morning announced Qt Digital Advertising 1.0 as its new ad platform that allows for developers to easily integrate advertising campaigns into Qt-based, cross-platform applications.

• The Qt Company devised Qt Digital Advertising as a way for the community and Qt users to integrate and manage advertising campaigns within Qt-powered programs. This is a new plug-in for the Qt toolkit for managing and monetizing campaigns for any Qt-based application.

• There are millions of tiny bugs all around us, in everything from our desktop applications to the appliances in the kitchen. Hidden, arbitrary conditions that cause unintended outputs and behaviors. There are many ways to find these bugs, but one way we don’t hear about very often is finding a bug in your own code, only to realize someone else made the same mistake. For example, [David Buchanan] found a bug in his multi-threaded PNG decoder and realized that the Apple PNG decoder had the same bug.

• PNG (Portable Network Graphics) is an image format just like JPEG, WEBP, or TIFF designed to replace GIFs. After a header, the rest of the file is entirely chunks. Each chunk is prepended by a four-letter identifier, with a few chunks being critical chunks. The essential sections are IHDR (the header), IDAT (actual image data), PLTE (the palette information), and IEND (the last chunk in the file). Compression is via the DEFLATE method used in zlib, which is inherently serial. If you’re interested, there’s a convenient poster about the format from a great resource we covered a while back.

Leftovers

• “The early days of Unix at Bell Labs” – Brian Kernighan (LCA 2022 Online) Enjoy!

Hardware

• I typically have a dozen computers up and running on my home network—yes, 12. And I am responsible for several more in other locations. With so many computers, there are always failures of various types, and I ultimately diagnose many of them as hardware problems. But it can be difficult to diagnose which hardware component is causing the issue.

• Just this week, I had a perplexing problem that I misdiagnosed the cause of on my primary workstation—twice. This article takes you through the process I followed. I show you where and why I went down the wrong path and how easy it can be to do so.

Integrity/Availability

Proprietary

Security

• Security updates have been issued by Debian (slurm-llnl), openSUSE (apache2, ghostscript, and watchman), Red Hat (kernel and telnet), SUSE (apache2, ghostscript, and kernel), and Ubuntu (clamav).

• Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, the world’s most popular operating system across private and public clouds, now offers the Ubuntu Security Guide tooling for compliance with the DISA Security Technical Implementation Guide (STIG) in Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. The new automated tooling builds on Canonical’s track record of designing Ubuntu for high security and regulated workloads, powering U.S. government agencies, prime contractors, and service providers. The Ubuntu Security Guide enables agencies and organisations to comply with the most stringent security requirements by automation and at scale.

• “With the Ubuntu Security Guide, we extend the Ubuntu experience to ease compliance with DISA security requirements. It is now very easy for DevOps teams and administrators to follow these requirements,” says Nikos Mavrogiannopoulos, Product Manager for security.

• The CIS benchmark has hundreds of configuration recommendations, so hardening and auditing a Linux system manually can be very tedious. Every administrator of systems that need to comply with that benchmark would wish that this process is easily usable and automatable. Why is that? Manual configuration of such a large number of rules leads to mistakes – mistakes that cause not only functional problems, but may also cause security breaches. In fact, one of the top reasons for security breaches the last few years is due to misconfigurations, according to Verizon data breach investigations.

• Let us introduce the Ubuntu Security Guide (USG). The Ubuntu Security Guide is a new tool available on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS that makes automation easy and greatly improves the usability of hardening and auditing with CIS, while allowing for environment-specific customizations. In the rest of this blog, we go through the major use cases such as CIS compliance, audit, and customization.

• The new tool will help enterprises comply with the Defense Information System Agency’s (DISA’s) Security Technical Implementation Guide (STIG).

• A US Department of Defense security configuration standard, DISA-STIG contains guidelines for hardening systems’ security posture. The standard also doubles as a checklist for securing protocols, services, and servers to reduce attack surfaces.

• Currently available for Ubuntu 20.04 or later versions, the new Ubuntu Security Guide is an easy-to-use compliance and auditing tool.

• Buttercup is a lightweight password manager for desktop and mobile. It comes with a strong 256bit AES encrypted vault that keeps your passwords and credentials secure and safe.

• Buttercup is a completely free, open-source solution which means you can download and use it without worrying about lock-in or fees.

• The project is consistent with several open-source child projects that include desktop, mobile, and Buttercup Core repositories.

• Buttercup organizes all of your passwords, and key entries in collections or groups, which are organized under different accounts.

• The mobile app uses React Native, while the desktop app uses React and Electron.

• Rolling Stone is reporting that the UK government has hired the M&C Saatchi advertising agency to launch an anti-encryption advertising campaign. Presumably they’ll lean heavily on the “think of the children!” rhetoric we’re seeing in this current wave of the crypto wars. The technical eavesdropping mechanisms have shifted to client-side scanning, which won’t actually help — but since that’s not really the point, it’s not argued on its merits.

• The UK government is set to launch a multi-pronged publicity attack on end-to-end encryption, Rolling Stone has learned. One key objective: mobilizing public opinion against Facebook’s decision to encrypt its Messenger app.

• The Home Office has hired the M&C Saatchi advertising agency — a spin-off of Saatchi and Saatchi, which made the “Labour Isn’t Working” election posters, among the most famous in UK political history — to plan the campaign, using public funds.

Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt/Fear-mongering/Dramatisation

• Crowdstrike actually expects…

• The number of malware infections targeting Linux devices rose by 35 per cent in 2021, and it looks lie the writers want to recruit IoT devices for DDoS (distributed denial of service) attacks.

• According to a Crowdstrike report in 2021 XorDDoS, Mirai, and Mozi were the most prevalent families, accounting for 22 per cent of Linux-targeting malware attacks observed in 2021.

• Mozi saw an explosive growth in its activity, with ten times more samples circulating in the wild the year that passed compared to the previous one. XorDDoS use increased by123 per cent.

• The number of malware infections targeting Linux devices rose by 35% in 2021, most commonly to recruit IoT devices for DDoS (distributed denial of service) attacks

Privacy/Surveillance

• The Ministry of Civil Aviation’s DigiYatra scheme is scheduled to take flight this year. The scheme aims to make air travel paperless by using facial recognition to authenticate the identities of passengers. It presents privacy risks of profiling and data exploitation without any remedies or regulatory framework.

• On 10 January, the British Government endorsed an app for women’s safety. The app allows women to broadcast their movements to somebody else. Similar apps already exist in Saudi Arabia, keeping husbands and fathers in control of womens’ lives.. Inside, the UK app could be the same binary code, sugar coated to look like a tool of empowerment.

• Two days later and a woman in Ireland, Ashling Murphy, was murdered in broad daylight. The Irish press was quick to compare this with the murder of Sarah Everard in London but the story that came to my mind was the 2012 murder of Jill Meagher. Jill emigrated from Ireland to Melbourne, much like my own mother. Jill was abducted in a main road and shopping district where I used to go almost every day.

• [...]

• One of my female interns in the Outreachy program wrote about a sponsor, Google, stalking her. In response, all she received were threats and insults. Google set about discrediting my intern and I just as Facebook has tried to discredit Frances Haugen. The Google employees claim they are the victims of harassment and abuse: how can they equate themselves with the trauma experienced by women like Ashling, Jill and Brittany?

• Almost four years ago, I explained why and how “Dumbphone is the new Smartphone. Especially for traveling”. In that post, remembering how years ago what we called “smartphones” took a wrong turn, I summarized why and how you don’t want to cross a border with your main smartphone.

• Only 6 percent of Arabic hate content is flagged as such when a user posts on Instagram, Politico reported in October. The Facebook algorithms used to identify terrorist content in Arabic wrongly take down posts 77 percent of the time, WIRED reported the same month. And Facebook employs just 766 Arabic-speaking moderators to check posts by 220 million Arabic-speaking users, French daily Le Monde revealed.

• Each piece of information, pulled from a dossier of internal documents provided by whistleblower Frances Haugen, seemed to be a damning new piece of evidence of how Facebook struggles to police content, not just in the Middle East but globally. So when Mark Zuckerberg announced that he was rechristening the company Meta, in tribute to growing ambitions to build tech for the metaverse, the online forum Reddit exploded with warnings. “Facebook has ruined our reality, now it’s coming for the metaverse too,” said one thread. “It’s another opportunity for Big Tech to colonize our lives in the name of profit,” said another. “We don’t have to stop it, we just don’t have to use it,” said one popular post on the thread, which received 4,500 upvotes.

• Two Middle East women′s rights activists are the latest identified Pegasus victims, and the United Kingdom government is planning an ad blitz against end-to-end encryption.

Civil Rights/Policing

• The 2022 Winter Olympic Games in Beijing have generated significant controversy. As early as February 2021, over 180 human rights groups had called for governments to boycott the Olympics, arguing that holding the Games in Beijing will legitimize a regime currently engaging in genocide against Uyghur people in China. Some governments including Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States have pledged to diplomatically boycott the Games, meaning that these countries will allow athletes to compete at the Games but will not send government delegates to attend the event.

• The International Olympic Committee (IOC), the organization responsible for organizing the Games, has been criticized for failing to uphold human rights. In December 2021, the United States House of Representatives voted unanimously to condemn the IOC and stated that the IOC had violated their own human rights commitments by cooperating with the Chinese government. Following professional tennis player Peng Shuai’s 2021 sexual assault accusation against Chinese Communist Party leader Zhang Gaoli and her subsequent disappearance, Human Rights Watch stated that “the IOC has vaulted itself from silence about Beijing’s abysmal human rights record to active collaboration with Chinese authorities in undermining freedom of speech and disregarding alleged sexual assault.” According to IOC documents, Zhang Gaoli headed the steering committee charged with securing and organizing the 2022 Games.

• Ebtisam al-Saegh’s phone hacked by Pegasus software, human rights groups say

Monopolies

Patents

Open Invention Network Legitimising More Software Patents (Instead of Fighting Them)

• Today, everyone — yes, even Microsoft — use Linux and open-source. It’s been years since Linux was under attack by SCO for imaginary copyright violations, and then Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer claimed that Linux violated over 200 of Microsoft’s patents. So over 15-years ago, the Open Invention Network (OIN) patent consortium was formed to defend Linux against intellectual property (IP) attacks. Even so, Linux and open-source software are still under attack from patent trolls and other attackers. That’s where the Open Invention Network (OIN) steps up by expanding its patent non-aggression coverage by updating its Linux System definition.

• Open Invention Network (OIN), the largest patent non-aggression community in history, announced today that it has increased its patent non-aggression coverage through an update to its definition of the Linux System. To keep pace with innovation Open Invention Network regularly revises and expands its Linux System coverage. This is the ninth expansion of the software packages and libraries protected under the Open Invention Network cross license.

• The Open Invention Network has announced an expansion of its “Linux System Definition”, which is the set of software covered by its patent-protection umbrella.

Copyrights

• The Supreme Court’s April 3rd decision of the long-running dispute between Oracle and Google brings to a last victorious conclusion the free software movement’s legal campaign, which began more than thirty years ago. Though the Justices have only now resolved the issue of API copyright, it was among the first of the legal problems with which FSF and I dealt.

• The heart of the free software movement’s long-term strategy was to harness the power of independent reinvention. Writing from scratch new programs that implemented both sides of all major software APIs was the technical pillar of our master plan. Licensing those programs on terms that protected the resulting commons—giving every user rights to study, copy, modify and share, with copyleft restriction on downstream licensing—was the legal pillar. The master plan of GNU was the independent reimplementation of both sides of all Unix APIs, thus allowing anything that could be done by general purpose computers to be done by software in which users had rights and free invention could flourish. When FSF and I started working together, in 1993, the Foundation—which was made possible by Richard Stallman’s 1990 MacArthur prize—was new, and the 1991 GPLv2 license brilliantly constructed for Stallman by Jerry Cohen was even newer. Gaining broad legal acceptance for GPLv2 and assessing the risk from the patenting of purely software inventions were immediate legal problems in need of my attention. But the threat posed by broad API copyright was the most urgent. The urgency arose because the issue was already headed for the US Supreme Court.

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