● 02.03.22

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 3/2/2022: GNU C Library 2.35 and Zorin OS 16 Education

Posted in News Roundup at 5:28 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxDistributionsDevices/EmbeddedFree Software/Open SourceLeftovers

GNU/Linux

Desktop/Laptop

• System76′s latest Linux laptop combines one of AMD’s most powerful 5000 series mobile CPUs with Nvidia’s mid-range RTX 3060. Configurable to up to $3,442, the Kudu targets Linux users who have a lot of work to do, while quietly nodding at those who like to play games every now and then, too.

• The 15.6-inch Kudu is the second-priciest offering in System76′s laptop lineup. It comes with an octa-core AMD Ryzen 9 5900HX, which has a base clock speed of 3.3 GHz and a boost of up to 4.6 GHz.

• [...]

• However, you can find cheaper Windows-based gaming laptops with similar power. And at its base configuration, the Kudu has 8GB of memory and just 240GB of storage but is still a pricey $1,800.

• Connectivity may disappoint, as there’s no Thunderbolt 4, like in System76′s Oryx Pro. Instead, the Kudu comes with USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-C and A, USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-A, USB 2.0 Type-A, Mini DisplayPort 1.4, HDMI, and two audio jacks. There’s also Ethernet, Wi-Fi 6, and Bluetooth 5.

Linux Magazine

Audiocasts/Shows

• Most major Linux distros offer debug packages but one of them stood out, that being Arch Linux but soon that will be changing.

• System76 reveals a new tool to make Pop’s desktop faster than the rest, and we break down that recent Btrfs defrag infinite loop bug.

• In this video, I am going to show an overview of Linux Lite 5.8 and some of the applications pre-installed.

Kernel Space

• Blender 3.0 introduced AMD HIP acceleration to the Cycles X render coding due to the removal of OpenCL. The support from AMD for Blender was restricted to Windows systems only, with probably Linux support added for Blender 3.1. However, AMD’s delay on drivers means that the HIP Linux support is now anticipating a launch with Blender 3.2. Blender 3.1 will launch in March 2022.

• ACPI Platform Profile support on Linux allows users to balance power or performance choices with modern laptops on the Linux platform. In general, it has worked without error across several devices experimented but is now malfunctioning with AMD Ryzen powered Lenovo systems.

• ACPI Platform Profile support permits users to select the power, balance, and power-savings preferences, along with other potential profiles, on Linux with current kernel activity that witnesses direct support obtainable for leading laptop brands such as Lenovo, Dell, and ASUS, to name a few. The consumer’s profile preference is controlled from inside a sysfs interface. Desktops like KDE Plasma and GNOME have already added suitable user interfaces to arrange it adequately from the system settings location.

• Since the start of the pandemic in March 2020, we have been offering our popular training courses online to our customers, in both public sessions (opened to individual registration) and dedicated sessions (organized on-demand for our customers, at their choice of date/time).

• With a more lengthy than usual message, Greg Kroah-Hartman has released the 4.4.302 stable kernel; it will be the last from the stable kernel team in the 4.4.x series. “Do not use it anymore unless you really know what you are doing.” He notes that the Civil Infrastructure Platform (CIP) project is considering maintaining 4.4 into the future; those interested should contact CIP. He also added some statistics showing a nearly six-year lifetime for the branch with 8.44 changes per day from over 3500 developers.

Applications

• This is a bugfix release that is API and ABI compatible with previous 0.3.x releases.

Instructionals/Technical

• Containers are run in the cloud. That’s because container technology allows websites and web apps to spawn fresh copies of themselves as demand increases. They’re the reason hundreds of millions of people can use popular sites without those sites buckling under the pressure of global traffic. Containers are a Linux technology, meaning that they rely on code (specifically cgroups and namespaces) unique to the Linux kernel, so when you run a container, you’re running Linux. Using container images from sites like quay.io and dockerhub.io, most people build new containers specific to their application or use case. But that makes some people wonder: If my container comes from a developer building on top of another developer’s container, where do those containers come from? Don’t worry, it’s not turtles all the way down. You can build a container from scratch, and there’s a great open source tool called Buildah to help you do it.

• At one point or another, if you’ve ever worked with computers, you’ve wanted to personalize your computer to reflect your likes, dislikes or hobbies. While the customization options on Windows leave little to the imagination, there aren’t many options with Ubuntu 20.04 right out of the box. If you want to go beyond the default tools, you have a plethora of customization applications that can transform the look and feel of your desktop into something completely new.

• In Ubuntu desktop settings, you can change your desktop wallpaper and move the icons around, but not much more. So, what about the lock screen? There are no built-in options to customize that. If you want to update the wallpaper on the lock screen of your Ubuntu 20.04, I will guide you on how to do that.

• In 2010 so-called smart TVs were not really that smart. I still had a large Sony Trinitron TV with a CRT, and I wanted to see if I could use the nettop with it. I bought a DVB-T USB adapter to enable the nettop to access digital terrestrial television, and I installed XBMC (now called KODI). I installed the now-defunct Sabayon Linux, and had a hell of a job getting ASRock’s CIR [Windows] MCE (Media Center Edition) remote to work. ASRock only released a driver (lirc_wb677) for the Nuvoton w836x7hg CIR chip in the nettop for Ubuntu 9.10, 10.04 and 10.10, and I had to patch it to get it to work with LIRC in Sabayon Linux. Later that year developer Jarrod Wilson released the first version of a new driver named nuvoton-cir for the Nuvoton w836x7hg chip, and in 2011 I had another struggle to get that working with LIRC and XBMC in Sabayon Linux. To be able to use the DVB-T USB adapter I installed Tvheadend in Sabayon Linux, which worked well, although the adapter needed to be connected to the house TV aerial in order to provide good reception, i.e. the small indoor aerial supplied with the DVB-T adapter was next to useless. I bought a VGA-to-Composite Video converter to connect the nettop’s D-Sub VGA socket to the TV’s composite video input. The Linux Desktop displayed on the CRT TV screen was OK-ish but, as you would expect, not comparable to the display on a TFT monitor. Basically, I was not satisfied with the result, and the nettop went back into its box after very little use. I did get it out briefly in 2016 to upgrade the 2GB RAM (two 1GB modules) to the maximum allowable 4GB (two 2GB modules) in case I might want to use the nettop in future. With two 2GB RAM modules the nettop detects 3327MB of RAM, which limits what can be done with it. When ‘proper’ smart TVs came onto the market, there was no longer any incentive to use an HTPC; everything and more that a nettop HTPC did could be done by a smart TV. In 2015 I succumbed and bought an LG smart TV, added a USB 1TB HDD, connected my DVD player to the TV and forgot about the nettop. The LG TV developed a fault three years later. I fixed it but its lack of catch-up TV apps for some of the main TV stations became irritating so, three years ago, I bought a new TV. The media player on the TV (a FINLUX TV) cannot play FLAC music files, and the Web browser is very slow with a buggy UI, so I began thinking about resurrecting the ASRock nettop in order to be able to browse the Web properly on my TV and to play my music flles through the TV’s sound bar. I finally got around to doing this recently, so here is the story…

• When you connect a USB drive to our system, it is usually mounted automatically and a directory with your user name is created under the media folder. You can also access it through your system’s file manager. Unfortunately, this is not always the case; sometimes you need to manually mount the USB drive in your system to access it.

• In this tutorial, we will explain how to manually mount and unmount a USB drive to your system. The commands and steps described in this article were run on an Ubuntu 20.04 LTS system. The same commands also work on Ubuntu 22.04.

• Matomo, formerly Piwik, is a free, open-source web analytics software tool. It is designed to provide you with key insights into your website’s visitor behavior and to help you understand the data collected to make informed decisions. Matomo also includes a Super Search feature for quick, simple, and automated data search across multiple websites.

• Matomo provides several reports such as daily, weekly, and monthly visitors stats; top referring sites; social media stats like Facebook advertising campaign performance or Twitter follower growth; visitor demographics and geographical location info, etc. It also offers a detailed analysis of your visitors’ behavior on your site—their actions and engagement time spent on pages—in order to see what works well for you or what could use some improvement.

• Matomo is perfect for service providers like web agencies, developers of eCommerce websites, and blog owners to analyze visitor behavior on the website. It works along with almost every common CMS and other content management system (CMS) like WordPress, Drupal, or Joomla.

• Matomo is written in PHP and fully compatible with Apache, Microsoft IIS Web Server, or Nginx. It uses MySQL or PostgreSQL to store data on a database server and can be used, according to its own website, “along with most popular programming languages”. Matomo also supports real-time analytics with real-time visitor tracking. In addition, Matomo supports various types of tracking tags for remarketing campaigns. Matomo supports mobile app install tracking and mobile app tracking for Android and iOS applications.

• Matomo is a must-have data collection tool for monitoring and enhancement of online lead generation campaigns, user interaction analysis, and website performance analysis.

• But you’re trying to install matomo web analytics on Debian but it doesn’t seem to be working. If you read through the article below, you will find a lot of useful and easy tips from experienced users who have successfully installed Matomo on Debian. You will learn how to install matomo in a way that works for your unique environment.

• Even in these days of cloud-based streaming music platforms like Amazon Music and Spotify, the chances are you’ll still want to play something from your local collection of audio files from time to time. Perhaps you have something so obscure the streaming services don’t have it. Or you ask for a particular track and they keep playing you the live version, or the extended remix, or any of the other variations when all you really want is the plain old as-first-released album track.

• Of course, Linux is well served with music players. Rhythmbox, Clementine, and Strawberry are fully-featured, sophisticated, and polished applications for managing your music collections. As well as playing your music they’ll do things like search for and download missing album art, play podcasts and internet radio, and edit the meta-data in the files themselves.

• But what if you want to access your music collection from a terminal window, without the overhead of a fully-loaded music player? Music on Console, or MOC, is a program that allows you to do just that. It loads in the blink of an eye, lets you search your music collection, find what you want to play, and just play it.

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Apache Cassandra on AlmaLinux 8. For those of you who didn’t know, Apache Cassandra is a free and open-source distributed NoSQL database management system. Generally, it is used as a real-time data store for transactional applications and as a read-intensive database. It supports relational databases including MySQL, PostgreSQL, and Microsoft SQL.

• 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 Apache Cassandra on an AlmaLinux 8. You can follow the same instructions for CentOS and Rocky Linux.

• In this docker-compose tutorial, we will show you how to set a hostname in Docker Compose.

• Docker is a platform as a service (PaaS) product that delivers software in packages called containers. A container is a standard unit of software that contains code and all its dependencies. Containers help the application to run in any environment without any issues. . A Docker container image is a package of software that includes everything needed to run an application.

• Tutorial to fix “remote HTTP basic access denied” error while trying to push code changes on Gitlab.

• Nothing is error-free these days. One system working fine at the moment might not work the next moment. The same goes for GitLab too as sometimes you might have fatal authentication failure errors while trying to push your code changes to your Gitlab account.

• Monitoring a computer resources can help to better understand issues when your device is going to be slow or freezing. BpyTOP on Raspberry PI makes available an enhanced and interactive resources monitoring tool that you will love

• In this tutorial, I’m going to show you how to install BpyTOP on Raspberry PI.

• Before starting, if you connect your Raspberry PI from a remote SSH connection please check that your SSH software supports TrueColor. For example, Puty supports TrueColor from version 0.71, so you will have to install the new Putty version if it has a lower version.

• This tutorial will useful for beginners to download QGIS and install QGIS desktop 3.22 on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, Ubuntu 22.04, and Fedora 35.

• QGIS is a free and open-source cross-platform desktop geographic information system (GIS) application that supports viewing, editing, and analysis of geospatial data.

• QGIS is available for Linux, UNIX, macOS, Windows, Android and supports numerous vector, database formats, and functionalities.

• This may seem like a question you would already know the answer to, but when you are connecting to Linux systems via SSH rather than interacting with a desktop environment then there are occasions when you may need to check what Linux version you are using. Luckily there are many Linux commands for checking the Linux version installed on your system.

• In this article we will explore some of the ways you can check what Linux OS version you are using. If you are looking to check what Linux kernel you have installed then we already covered how to check the Linux kernel version.

Games

• Ahead of the Steam Deck release, it seems the desktop client for Steam is getting a few handy UI changes too.

• In one of the most recent upgrades to the opt-in Steam Client Beta, a small but very useful change came in to let you actually see the required space of a game on the Library page before downloading. It’s such a small change, but a very welcome one for when you’re quickly flicking through your thousands-strong library to pick something to install.

• Do you have experience with the Unity game engine? Well, Daniel Mullins Games are hiring to continue future development of Inscryption and the job description looked pretty interesting.

• What is Inscryption? It’s described as “an inky black card-based odyssey that blends the deckbuilding roguelike, escape-room style puzzles, and psychological horror into a blood-laced smoothie. Darker still are the secrets inscrybed upon the cards… “. It released back in October 2021 and quickly became popular. With an Overwhelmingly Positive review score on Steam from over 50,000 players!

• Discord is software that is used for VoIP and instant messaging purposes. In this discord tutorial, we will show you the method to get discord overlay in games.

• The developers of The Hand of Merlin, a turn-based rogue-lite RPG in which Arthurian legend meets with sci-fi horror, have confirmed their plans for the full release.

• It’s getting closer to the big 1.0 to leave Early Access and keeping up with their previous confirmation, they do plan to support Linux (and macOS) officially too. In the development post, their team mentioned however their final release has been pushed back to sometime this “Spring” to not butt-heads with some of the bigger games releasing, and to give them more time to polish the game.

• In parallel to our work on Godot 3.5 (with a first beta) and 4.0 (and finally alpha 1!), we backport important fixes to the stable 3.4 branch for use in production.

• A number of such fixes have been queued since the 3.4.2 release, so we’re getting ready to release Godot 3.4.3, and this first Release Candidate is your chance to help us validate it.

Desktop Environments/WMs

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• GNOME Shell’s unique panel corners are being retired after more than a decade of decorating peoples desktops.

• If you haven’t used a vanilla GNOME session you might not know what these are. Many downstreams, including Ubuntu, patch out this subtle frame in their respective Shell .css.

• See if you can spot the panel corners in this screenshot of stock GNOME Shell running on Fedora:

Distributions

• Zorin OS 16 was one of the most impressive distro releases in 2021. You might want to learn more about Zorin OS 16 and Zorin OS 16 lite, if you are curious.

• Now, after a while, the Zorin OS team finally decided to release the Education edition of Zorin OS 16.

• You should expect all the improvements to Zorin OS 16 along with specific modifications to tailor it for education.

• Note that the Education edition of Zorin OS 16 is completely free to download. You get a separate Lite version for older computers as well.

• The Zorin OS 16 Education edition comes pre-loaded with all sorts of educational software and learning tools, and it targets pre-schools, primary and secondary schools, as well as any other educational environment that wants to install a free and Open Source operating system on their computers.

• Leveraging all the new features and enhancements shipped in Zorin OS 16, the Education edition includes several new educational apps, such as the powerful Kolibri app that gives you instant access to a huge, ready-to-download library of educational content like books, videos, and interactive lessons in different languages.

New Releases

• With this new release, Peppermint OS switches from using LXDE to Xfce as its default desktop environment.

• Peppermint OS is a Linux distro based on Debian that aims to provide a familiar environment for newcomers to Linux. It’s a minimalistic Linux distro that demands fewer hardware resources thus an excellent choice for the older machine.

• Being based on Debian, Peppermint OS brings some familiar concepts along with it to the table, namely the fact that you start with a fully operational LiveCD that brings you to a default desktop from which you can give it a spin.

• Today, the new version of Peppermint OS finally becomes available, and surprisingly it comes without a version number.

• New ISO of Archcraft is now available to download.

• Not a major Release, Just updated the ISO.

• Changelog

• Updated Alacritty Configs Updated Dunst Configs Updated Few Scripts Updated the configs for all Window Managers Screenshots in clipboard

IBM/Red Hat/Fedora

• In this post, we will configure Red Hat Satellite to manage content for our Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) environment. We will enable RHEL repositories on Satellite and define a RHEL lifecycle.

• It’s been almost a year since Red Hat Developer published Build an API using Quarkus from the ground up. That article tried to provide a single full reference implementation of an OpenAPI-compliant REST API using Quarkus. Since then, there’s been a major version release of Quarkus, with new features that make building and maintaining a Quarkus-based REST API much easier. In this article, you will revisit the Customer API from the previous article and see how it can be improved thanks to advances in Quarkus.

• In creating this article, we made an effort to remain aware of a subtle consideration in any development effort: you always need to keep an eye on your imports. Whenever you add imports, you should consciously attempt to limit your exposure to third-party libraries, focusing on staying in the abstraction layers such as the MicroProfile abstractions. Remember, every library you import is your responsibility to care for and update.

• Sysadmins love their one-liners. In fact, one of Enable Sysadmin’s most popular articles of 2021 was 20 one-line Linux commands to add to your toolbox. I was trying to remember one of my more esoteric command strings a few years ago when I realized that keeping all of those one-liners straight can be a cognitive burden. Do you try to remember them? Maybe you simply bookmark your favorite ones or maintain a useful_stuff.txt file on your desktop, as I did for years?

• As we approach the two-year mark since COVID-19 first disrupted our world, many people are reevaluating their priorities and their feelings about work. The familiar office setting where we formerly socialized with colleagues, discussed projects face-to-face, and collaborated daily has been replaced with a remote work world in which work/life boundaries are often fuzzy or even non-existent.

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

• When one thinks about open-source desktop OSes, the buck stops at Linux. The Linux kernel has spawned numerous use case-specific distros; Ubuntu and elementary OS continue to be some of the best options available in the Linux universe.

• While both distros continue to command respect, nonetheless, they continue to battle it out on the battlefield. Both distros have unique points of mention, which make them stand out in their respective categories.

• Here’s a comparison between Ubuntu and elementary OS to make your decision simpler.

• When I wrote about the new “Ubuntu Pro” section in Ubuntu 22.04‘s software settings panel I said the banner wasn’t a nag screen or a desktop notification but something you had to go out of your way to see.

• Not so in the latest daily builds of the Jammy Jellyfish.

• Upon login today I was greeted by a desktop notification asking if I ‘want to enable Ubuntu Pro?’.

• Two actions are available when click on the notification: “Don’t remind me again” and “Enable Ubuntu Pro” (though thanks to a bug the notification will appear on every login even if you click “don’t remind me” – but that will get fixed soon).

• A choice of system accent colour could be on offer in Ubuntu 22.04 when it arrives this spring.

• Developers are currently considering patching in support to let users pick an accent colour used within the Yaru theme. A palette of pre-set colours would be available to pick from, similar to those macOS and Windows 11 offer their users, as inline with similar approaches taken by downstream distros like elementary OS and Linux Mint.

• Which is pretty exciting.

• The server was reconfigured to launch a Canonical Ubuntu virtual machine that stored data and ran an application that blockchained the results, which were sent back to Earth.

Devices/Embedded

• Raspberry Pi Imager 1.7 follows hot on the hills of the stable release of the 64-bit Raspberry Pi OS and introduces support for downloading and flashing all variants of Raspberry Pi OS 64-bit, though the 32-bit variant remains the recommended one for now.

• Several new advanced settings are present in this update, such as support for the cloudinit format used by the Ubuntu Server operating system, support for specifying a username, support for hidden Wi-Fi SSIDs, support for multi-line authorized_keys, as well as the ability to set username and password separately from SSH.

Open Hardware/Modding

• Some people like crossword puzzles, some are serious sudoku ninjas, but [Andrea Favero] likes to keep himself sharp, by learning coding and solving control problems, and that is something we can definitely relate to. When learning a new platform, it’s a very good idea to have a substantial project or goal in mind, and learn what is needed on the way there. [Andrea] chose to build an autonomous Rubik’s cube solver, and was kind enough to document exactly how how to do it, and we’re glad of it!

• [Kevin Lynagh] is interested in tiny PCB stepper motors, and after reviewing the various projects and patents to-date, decided to give it a try himself. These are basically a stepper motor that’s been unrolled and made flat — traces on the PCB act as the coils and tiny magnetic “robots” act as the rotor.

• Sometimes a great hack is great for no other reason than that it’s fun, and [Michael Rechtin]’s DIY Active Aero Spoiler and Air Brake certainly qualifies as a fun hack. This is a mod designed to live in a world where looks are everything, stickers add horsepower, and a good sound system is more important than good wheel alignment. Why is that? Because like the switch that exists only to activate the mechanism that turns it off, the DIY Active Aero Spoiler and Air Brake seen below is almost completely useless. So to understand its allure, we must understand its inspiration.

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• Hey! In this post I’ve shared my personal experience with contributing to open source projects. I’m still a learner, and probably will be one for rest of my life. But I believe I’m beyond that point where I was confused about “how do I even start”. I’m recording my experience in hope that it proves to be useful to someone else.

• Since this post is meant to record my personal experience and observations, I have glossed over some commonly known practices like looking for good first issues, or learning basics of the toolchain you’ll be using. I find those advice to be abundantly available on the internet.

• [...]

• By now, you probably have some idea about how to go about making your initial contributions to your favorite project.

• Once you make your first successful contribution, you feel lot more confident. You feel motivated to take on bigger tasks, and become active in discussions. You should have already realized that this is a team effort. You work with constant back and forth reviews and suggestions. The more you participate, the more you learn. Probably for this reason, I like joining different channels and stalking their discussions. (even if I don’t understand half the technical terms they use!)

• This was a beginner sharing his experience for other beginners. Hoping this post cleared up your doubts and you feel more confident about stepping into the world of open source software development!

• StarlingX, an open-source platform for edge computing based on OpenStack, has hit release 6.0 with a Linux Kernel upgrade plus security and deployment enhancements to make it easier to manage systems.

• The StarlingX project offers a complete software stack for edge and IoT deployments, with support for code running in containers or virtual machines. It was started by Intel and Wind River, but is now an independent project supported by the Open Infrastructure Foundation, with code available under the Apache 2 licence.

• Companies using StarlingX in production systems include T-Systems, Verizon and Vodafone, with the code freely available to download from the StarlingX website.

• [...]

• StarlingX is described as being suitable for a wide range of edge use cases and applications from telecoms through retail to industrial IoT. It supports ultra-low latency, extremely high service uptime, and small-footprint deployments.

• The Open Infrastructure Foundation’s Ildiko Vancsa, who is senior manager for its Community & Ecosystem division, said of the release: “StarlingX is already delivering the essential functionality to build out infrastructure from the core to the edge by providing a robust, flexible and scalable foundation with OpenStack that can be used to build your central cloud as well as get installed on the edge to manage a smaller pool of resources.”

• One of the original creators of the Hudi project at Uber has launched a new company that is set to bring a managed service to market to operationalize cloud data lakes.

• [...]

• Vinoth Chandar: We built Hudi during the hyper-growth stage at Uber as a way for the company to scale its data lake and bring in data transactions faster. We made Hudi feel more like a data warehouse than just a data lake. Over the last four years, the Hudi community has grown and has helped to pioneer new transactional data lake capabilities.

• What we routinely see in the community is that it still takes a lot of time for companies to operationalize their data lakes. We felt like we can actually create value here by creating a managed service that can help you get started.

• Onehouse is not about being an enterprise Hudi company, it’s more about helping companies to get started with data lakes, with open data formats, without the need that Uber had to make to get Hudi started.

• Following the experts’ recommendation last year, we’re logically separating the two elections more clearly, although we currently don’t have the capacity to run elections at separate times. We’ll consider that option again in the future.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• Mozilla’s mission is to make sure the Internet remains open and accessible to all. Four years ago, we launched Firefox Reality, a browser for mixed reality, and our exploration in browsing in new and emerging realities. We’ve been at the forefront of developing new technologies, like WebVR and WebAR, and in some instances, Mozilla continues to remain the host and incubator of those new technologies, as with Hubs. With other technologies, we find communities and organizations where our projects can continue to grow and contribute to the web like WebAssembly, Rust and Servo. Today, we’re delighted to announce that the Firefox Reality browser technology will continue under Igalia where they will uphold the same principles we started when we created Firefox Reality — an open source browser that respects your privacy.

Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra

• Six months after LibreOffice 7.2, version 7.3 is out with faster and more accurate file importing and rendering for improved compatibility with Microsoft Office.

• The new release is the latest “fresh” version. The Document Foundation also offers a “still” edition, which is based on an older but more extensively tested release; it’s currently on version 7.1.8. The differences aren’t that dramatic – without rehashing the release notes, these are point releases, so don’t expect huge changes.

• It has better support for importing Microsoft Office documents, and lots of relatively modest improvements in diagrams, charts, hyperlink support, and more. If you really push Microsoft’s offering hard, LibreOffice probably isn’t for you, but if like most of us you barely scratch the surface of what it can do, you will probably be fine with LibreOffice.

FSF

GNU Projects

• Version 2.35 of the GNU C Library has been released. New features include Unicode 14.0.0 support, support for the C.UTF-8 locale, a bunch of new math functions, support for restartable sequences, and much more; see the announcement for details.

• GNU Solidario and Leibniz Universität Hannover (LUH) are now partners in GNU Health, the Libre digital health ecosystem.

• This agreement makes the German university a member of the GNU Health Alliance of academic and research institutions, to work on the research and development of GNU Health, the award-winning Libre digital health ecosystem.

• The partnership was signed on February 2nd, 2022, by Prof. Dr.-Ing. Gabriele von Voigt, head of the Computational Health Informatics department at Leibniz Universität Hannover and Dr. Luis Falcón, president of GNU Solidario.

Programming/Development

• I Hate gl_PointSize And So Can You

• Yes, we’re here.

• After literally years of awfulness, I’ve finally solved (for good) the debacle that is point size conversion from GL to Vulkan.

• What’s so awful about it, you might be asking. How hard can it be to just add gl_PointSize to a shader, you follow up with as you push your glasses higher up your nose.

• Allow me to explain.

• Sometimes there are those unremarkable things which let you pause for a moment, and realize what a great gift of our time open source software and open knowledge is. At some point in time someone figured out how to calculate the sunrise and sunset time on the current date for your location. Someone else wrote that up and probably again a different person published it on the internet. The Internet Archive preserved a copy of it so I can still link to it. Someone took this algorithm and published a code sample on StackOverflow, which was later on used by the SatAgro guys to create the python-suntime library. Now I could come along, copy the core function of this library, and convert it within a few hours, mostly spent learning a few things about Lua, to a Lua script.

• Crystal is a general-purpose, concurrent, multi-paradigm, object-oriented programming language.

• With syntax heavily inspired by the language Ruby, it is a compiled language with built-in static type-checking, but specifying the types of variables or method arguments is generally unneeded. This adds the benefit of a shallower learning curve.

• The language also offers a powerful macro system, the compiler automatically checks for null references in compile time, a sleek concurrency model that uses green threads, as well as dedicated syntax to easily call native libraries.

• Crystal is published under the Apache License 2.0.

• We are happy to announce the release of Qt Design Studio 3.0.

Shell/Bash/Zsh/Ksh

• The Linux expand and unexpand commands sound like they can make files larger and smaller, but what they actually do is turn tabs into spaces and spaces into tabs.

• In this post, we’ll use some simple text files to demonstrate what happens when you use expand and unexpand. We’ll also compare how these commands work with some likely more familiar commands—sed and awk—that can provide similar results and offer additional options.

Rust

• Almost a year ago, the Async Working Group embarked on a collaborative effort to write a shared async vision document. As we enter 2022, we wanted to give an update on the results from that process along with the progress we are making towards realizing that vision.

• [...]

• To set the scene, imagine it’s Rust 2024, and you’ve decided to build your first project in Rust. You’re working on a project that uses GitHub and you’d like a tool that will walk over all the issues on your repository and do some automatic triage. You decide to use async Rust for this. You pull out the Rust book and thumb over to the Async I/O section. In there, it shows you the basic structure of an async Rust application.

Leftovers

Science

• As great as cameras that operate in the visual light spectrum are, they omit a lot of the information that can be gleaned from other wavelengths. There is also the minor issue that visibility is often impacted, such as when it’s raining, or foggy. When this happens, applications such as self-driving cars which rely on this, have a major issue. Through the use of sensors that are sensitive to other wavelengths, we can however avoid many of these issues.

• Short-wave infrared radiation (SWIR) is roughly the part of the electromagnetic spectrum between 1.4 μm – 3 μm, or 100 THz – 214 THz. This places it between visible light and microwaves, and above long-wave IR at 20 THz – 37 THz. LWIR is what thermal cameras use, with LWIR also emitted by warm objects, such as the human body.

• SWIR is largely unaffected by water in the atmosphere, while also passing through materials that are opaque to visible light. This allowing SWIR to be used for the analysis and inspection of everything from PCBs and fruit to works of art to capture details that are otherwise invisible or very hard to see.

• Unfortunately, much like thermal camera sensors, SWIR sensors are rather expensive. Or they were, until quite recently, with the emergence of quantum-dot-based sensors that significantly decrease the costs of these sensors.

• We have, in Western society, managed to simultaneously botch the dreams of democracy, capitalism, social coherence, and techno-utopianism, all at once. It’s embarrassing actually. I am embarrassed. You should be embarrassed.

Hardware

• When mathematically inspired maker [Henry Segerman] conspired with circus performer and acrobat [Marcus Paoletti] to advance the craft of acrobatics in round metal objects (such as cyr wheels and German Wheels), they came up with a fascinating concept that has taken shape in what [Henry] calls the Tao-Line.

• Similar performance devices go in a straight line or can be turned on edge, but the Tao-Line is far more nimble. This is because the Tao-Line is not a continuous cylinder, but rather is made up of numerous circular shapes that allow the Tao-Line to be turned and inverted at different points in its rotation.

• What does that mean though? What is Software Defined Storage (often abbreviated to SDS)? At a high level: It is independent software used to manage storage hardware, regardless of the type or hardware vendor. The idea is a simple one. Most off-the-shelf hardware has been somewhat commoditized. That is, take your HP’s, your Dell’s, Supermicro’s or anything else. Fill it with whatever Seagate, Western Digital, HGST, and / or other storage drive. Then let the software do its magic. Under this model, it is the software that has become the defining factor.

• It is an attractive approach to managing your data. Think about it: no hardware vendor lock-in. Instead of being an EMC shop or a NetApp shop, you are now given the option to mix and match hardware while relying on the software to bring it all together.

• Although, there is a downside to all of this. Let us ignore the obvious fact that it is up to you to locate and purchase the hardware separate from the software. Software Defined Storage promises us the world but only in recent years has started to showcase its shortcoming: that being centered around the hardware.

Integrity/Availability

Proprietary

Pseudo-Open Source

Privatisation/Privateering

Linux Foundation

• Following a meeting with government and industry leaders at the White House, OpenSSF announced the Alpha-Omega Project to improve the security posture of open source software (OSS) through direct engagement of software security experts and automated security testing.

• One big obstacle on the path towards an all-electric car future (besides pipe-dreams like these, of course!) is that it is hard to build enough economically sustainable charging stations, if there is no standardization to speak of behind those chargers. That’s why it is great that the Linux Foundation (LF) just announced plans to fix this lack of standardization with a new project called “LF Energy EVerest”.

• FINOS, the Fintech Open Source Foundation and financial sector project of The Linux Foundation, and The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, today announced the name change of its event dedicated to driving collaboration and innovation in financial services through open source software and standards from Open Source Strategy Forum to the Open Source in Finance Forum. The event started in 2017 under the auspices of FINOS prior to it joining the Linux Foundation in 2020, and has since grown to become the flagship event for the fast growing open source movement in financial services and its unique challenges. The name is being changed to better reflect the focus of the event within the larger landscape of open source events produced by The Linux Foundation and its projects.

Security

• Security updates have been issued by Debian (librecad), Fedora (flatpak, flatpak-builder, and glibc), Mageia (chromium-browser-stable, connman, libtiff, and rust), openSUSE (lighttpd), Oracle (cryptsetup, nodejs:14, and rpm), Red Hat (varnish:6), SUSE (kernel and unbound), and Ubuntu (linux, linux-aws, linux-aws-5.11, linux-aws-5.13, linux-gcp, linux-gcp-5.11, linux-hwe-5.13, linux-kvm, linux-oem-5.13, linux-oracle, linux-oracle-5.11, linux-raspi, linux, linux-aws, linux-aws-5.4, linux-bluefield, linux-gcp, linux-gcp-5.4, linux-gkeop, linux-gkeop-5.4, linux-hwe-5.4, linux-ibm, linux-kvm, linux-oracle, linux-oracle-5.4, linux, linux-aws, linux-aws-hwe, linux-azure, linux-dell300x, linux-gcp-4.15, linux-hwe, linux-kvm, linux-oracle, linux-raspi2, linux-snapdragon, linux-gke, linux-gke-5.4, mysql-5.7, mysql-8.0, python-django, and samba).

• A remote attacker could exploit some of these vulnerabilities to take control of an affected system.

• CISA has released an Industrial Controls Systems Advisory (ICSA) that details vulnerabilities in the Airspan Networks Mimosa product line. An attacker could exploit these vulnerabilities to achieve remote code execution, create a denial-of-service condition, or obtain sensitive information.

• This advisory contains mitigations for Improper Authorization, Incorrect Authorization, Server-side Request Forgery, SQL Injection, Deserialization of Untrusted Data, OS Command Injection, and Use of a Broken or Risky Cryptographic Algorithm vulnerabilities in Airspan Networks Mimosa network management software.

• Spyderbat, Inc., a pioneer in securing Linux runtime environments, has appointed Linux and Unix expert Hal Pomeranz to its Advisory Board. Pomeranz joins based on his proficiency in cybersecurity and Open Source software. As his SANS Institute profile will tell you, “Nobody can show you how to forensicate with Open Source tools like Hal!”

Privacy/Surveillance

• Today, Access Now sent a letter to Integrity Partners & Associates, LLC (Integrity Partners) and Moelis & Company to stop the planned acquisition of notorious spyware purveyor NSO Group. U.S. venture capital firm Integrity Partners is in its final stages of negotiations to purchase NSO, and global investment bank Moelis & Company played a role in facilitating the deal.

Defence/Aggression

• Four years ago I warned that robotic dogs that can open doors could just as easily keep them shut, and we should be more worried about what the *door** means, rather than the robodog.

• This year, robodogs could be finally, really used to keep doors shut or, more professionally, to “leverage technology to force-multiply [police] presence, as well as reduce [american, A/N] human exposure to life-threatening hazards”:

Environment

Energy

• The paradox is that it is much easier to achieve that goal if the batteries contain highly toxic, highly troublesome substances, that is if they are made in the most anti-ecological way possible.

• [...]

• The solution is clear, just politically hard to manage as quickly as it would be needed: “the industry needs to rethink its approach. Today’s recycling methods are crude and designed to extract only high-value materials from the cells.“

• Ars Technica analyzes whether we could already use big batteries to power trains. Here is why you should read the whole analysis.

• [...]

• motives move their wheels with electric generators. Attaching those same generators to big batteries, instead of the diesel engines that currently power them, would finally make the trains as green as those batteries.

• Until a few years ago, this solution was really too expensive. Now, it’s almost profitable, at least in some scenarios. For details, see the links. The conclusion, however, is that…

Finance

• Budget 2022-23 evokes conflicted sentiments. On the bright side, it contains a markedly appreciable allocation to National Digital Health Mission (NDHM) and BSNL, as well as provisions for utilising 5% of the Universal Service Obligation General Fund (USOF) to promote R&D and commercialization of technologies and solutions. Unfortunately, allocations towards PMGDISHA remain low, while concerns remain that significant capital expenditure may not take place.

• Stephen Diehl has written what seems to me a great description of the “Intellectual Incoherence of Cryptoassets”, that is of digital currencies based on cryptography and distributed online databases of which Bitcoin is currently the most notorious example.

• The central argument stands by itself, as a good, not unbearably technical summary of what is wrong with cryptocurrencies as they are today. That is, cryptocurrencies are not always and only bad, by definition. But to get what’s good in them, here is what must be removed.

Misinformation/Disinformation

• The controversy surrounding U.S. podcaster and vaccine sceptic Joe Rogan, whose top-rated Spotify show prompted protests by singers and scientists alike, has reignited debate on how online platforms police Covid-19 misinformation.

• Spotify is the latest tech firm to come under pressure for airing false claims and conspiracies since the start of the coronavirus pandemic – an issue that the World Health Organisation has said was costing lives.

• While some companies have curbed harmful content, critics say their efforts have not gone far enough.

Civil Rights/Policing

• Today, U.S. Senators Ron Wyden, Cory Booker, and Representative Yvette Clarke introduced the Algorithmic Accountability Act of 2022 — a bill that holds the tech industry responsible for the life-altering judgements their automated decision systems make. Access Now is proud to endorse this legislation, which would help combat the devastating impacts companies’ algorithmic systems have on the welfare of people who rely on digital platforms — from approving loans, to issuing medical prescriptions.

• “Opaque and often-biased algorithms are deciding who has access to housing, education, and other opportunities, and we should be concerned,” said Willmary Escoto, U.S. Policy Analyst at Access Now. “The tech firms who deploy these automated decision systems usually answer to no one. By requiring companies to assess the impacts of the systems they use and sell, this bill will help combat algorithmic discrimination in defense of human rights.”

• As the Budget Session of the Parliament commences, we have prepared our third legislative brief on digital rights to highlight some of the focus areas within the larger issues of technology policies and digital rights that call for the extensive deliberation in the houses of the Parliament.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• he has not visited a traditional website for a long time, and mostly sees “content” through centralized, specialized platforms like YouTube, Medium and Twitter

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