● 02.13.22

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 13/2/2022: Intel Thread Director and RISC-V

Posted in News Roundup at 5:05 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxDistributionsDevices/EmbeddedFree Software/Open SourceLeftovers

GNU/Linux

Audiocasts/Shows

• On this episode of This Week in Linux, KDE Plasma 5.24, KDE Discover Redesign, Intel Joins RISC-V International, Mozilla Firefox 97, Inkscape 1.1.2, OpenMandriva Lx 4.3, Qubes OS 4.1.0, Steam Deck Hands-On Hardware Reviews, DBrand’s Project Killswitch, The Nobara Project, Escuelas Linux 7.3, Absolute Linux 15.0, Twister OS & Twister UI. All that and much more on Your Weekly Source for Linux GNews!

Kernel Space

• Hetereogeneous computing is nothing new, of course, but typically it has been one type of CPU core and one type of GPU, along with media processing blocks and other small functional units — at least on desktop and notebooks systems. Intel’s Alder Lake CPUs are the first x86-64 processors to embrace a hybrid paradigm with two separate CPU architectures on the same die.

• These two separate CPU architectures have different strengths and capabilities. The Golden Cove “performance cores” (or P-cores) feature Intel’s latest high-performance desktop CPU architecture, and they are blisteringly fast. Meanwhile, the Gracemont “efficiency cores” (or E-cores) are so small that four of them, along with 2MB of shared L2 cache, can nearly fit in the same space as a single Golden Cove core. They’re slower than the Golden Cove cores, but also much more efficient, at least in theory.

• In the past year, Linaro has addressed an increase in Linux kernel release candidates whilst also detecting and reporting more than double the amount of regressions, compared to the previous year.

• Linaro’s Linux Kernel Functional Testing (LKFT) has dealt with these Release Candidates (RC’s) within a 48hour SLA (Service Level Agreement). This is no small feat given we have been able to build, boot and test more than a million kernels. These numbers are even more impressive when you take into account that LKFT has achieved all this without extra staffing.

Applications

• The server and mobile industries know open source well. But open source isn’t just about the technology. First and foremost, open source is about sharing, and if there’s one thing people love to share more than anything, it’s self-expression in the form of art. Whether you consider yourself an artist or not, you can foster your own creativity with open source applications, and possibly end up with something you’re proud to share with others. Here are 26 applications in seven different artistic categories to help you act on your every inspiration.

Instructionals/Technical

• In this guide, we will illustrate how to install and use Nu shell on Linux.

• Introduction

• Nu shell is a new Linux shell, it aims at simplifying command outputs with pipe. It comes with interesting built-in commands, is fast and easy to use. The focus of Nu shell is Pipe-lining which enables terminal users to own the terminal, commanding it to produce the output as needed.

• In this guide, we will show you how to fix the problem of ubuntu/mint no sound after the installation with some methods.

• Most Linux Distributions use open-source fonts to substitute Microsoft’s iconic typefaces like Arial, Courier New, and Times. Red Hat created the Liberation family to replace these similar-looking but different sizes — all you have to do is select your preferred font when editing documents so that they’ll be readable without any disruptions!

• For users who want to install Microsoft fonts and want to use them in LibreOffice, the following tutorial will teach you how to install Microsoft fonts on Debian 11 Bullseye.

• Apache Maven is an open-source tool that allows the building automation of your java projects. It can also be used for projects in C#, Ruby, etc. Its most popular usage would likely involve Java development! The maven project comes from the Apache Software Foundation, where they were previously part of the Jakarta Project before moving on their own.

• The GPU-Viewer is a free, open-source project to create an easy-to-use interface for glxinfo, vulkaninfo, and clinfo. The program will be developed using Python 3 with GTK3 to display all the important details extracted from these programs on one page alongside other useful tools like grep or AWK.

• In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install the latest GPU-Viewer on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy Jellyfish.

• UNRAR is widely known and used amongst Windows users. RAR files are much smaller archives and compress better than ZIP for most files by compressing files “together,” saving more space. UNRAR does not come pre-installed natively on AlmaLinux and is not featured in its repositories.

• The following tutorial will show you how to install UNRAR on Almalinux 8 Workstation or Server with RPM FUSION, along with the most commonly used commands.

• GParted is a free and easy-to-use GTK -based graphical user interface tool for all your partition needs. With one click, you can create new disk partitions or adjust the size of already existing ones–Gparted will even resize partitioned files without losing any information! You also have access options like moving around hard drives as well checking basic info such as free space usage.

• In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install GParted on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy Jellyfish.

• Ubuntu Budgie is a desktop environment that is free and open-source that uses GNOME technologies such as GTK (> 3.x) and is developed by the Solus project, which also contributes to its design through contributors from numerous communities, including Arch Linux; Manjaro; openSUSE Tumbleweed – among others.

• For users seeking an alternative to GNOME that is lightweight and sleek with a simple UI instead of focusing on eye candy, then Budgie is worth checking out.

• In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install Budgie Desktop Environment on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy Jellyfish.

• After installing MySQL on your Linux system, you can create one or more users and grant them permissions to do things like create databases, access table data, etc.

• It is not recommended to use the root account, but rather create a new account and grant privileges as needed. In this tutorial, you will see how to allow a user to create a MySQL database on Linux.

• If you have installed MySQL on your Linux system and need to have one or more users with an empty password, it is possible to either create new users with empty passwords or reset an existing user’s password to being empty.

• This obviously goes against all conventional security practices, but it may be more convenient in testing scenarios or other unique situations. Whatever your use case may be, we will assume you know what you are doing and have taken into consideration the obvious security risk of having a MySQL user with an empty password.

• It is even possible to configure the root account to have an empty password. In this tutorial, we will take you through the step by step instructions to allow an empty password in MySQL.

• If you wish to access your MySQL server remotely, it will be necessary to configure one or more users to allow access from remote hosts. If you do not know all the IP addresses of the connecting hosts, then you can simply allow connections from all hosts.

• In this tutorial, we will take you through the step by step instructions of allowing remote connections to a MySQL server on a Linux system from all hosts. These instructions should work independently of whichever Linux distro you are using.

• The purpose of this tutorial is to show how to access MySQL remotely with the root account. Conventional security practice is to disable remote access for the root account, but it is very simple to turn on that access in a Linux system.

• Read on and follow through the step by step instructions to allow root remote access in your MySQL server.

Devices/Embedded

Open Hardware/Modding

• Last fall, we wrote about Allwinner D1s/F133-A RISC-V processor and the upcoming MangoPi MQ1, a tiny 4x4cm board based on the processor. The board is not for sale, but we have more details, and the company is also working on an Arm version equipped with Allwinner T113-S3 dual-core Cortex-A7 processor that is pin-to-pin compatible with F133-A SoC.

• The Allwinner F133-A board will finally be called MangoPi Nezha-MQ, or MangoPi MQ for shorts, and come with 64MB on-chip RAM while the Allwinner T113-S3 board, with 128MB on-chip RAM, will be named MangoPi MQ-Dual. Both are fitted with a Realtek RTL8189-based Wi-Fi module, offer display and camera interfaces, two USB-C interfaces, and headers for GPIOs.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

Kernighan

• As beloved Unix pioneer Brian Kernighan approaches his 80th birthday, he made a special appearance at this year’s Linux Conference Australia. At the traditional January event — held virtually for the second year in a row — Kernighan reminisced on the 1970s and “The early days of Unix at Bell Labs,” always careful to acknowledge the contributions of others, and of those developers who’d preceded him.

• Kernighan also used the occasion to reflect on the lessons to be learned from the history of the Unix operating system, from the C programming language, and even from Microsoft’s foray into Unix — ultimately asking the poignant question of whether a Unix-like phenomenon could ever happen again.

• And finally, Kernighan also looked to the future, and expressed a sincere hope that the talk might “perhaps teach us something about how software development can be done effectively, and perhaps how to manage people and processes to make them as productive as possible.”

Web Browsers

• There are plenty of web browsers available for Linux. A lot of them are based on Chromium but we also have a list of browsers that are not based on Chromium.

• You are here: Home / List / 10 Open Source Lightweight Web Browsers for Linux 10 Open Source Lightweight Web Browsers for Linux Last updated February 13, 2022 By Marco Carmona Leave a Comment

• There are plenty of web browsers available for Linux. A lot of them are based on Chromium but we also have a list of browsers that are not based on Chromium.

• Recently, a reader asked for a lightweight web browsers recommendation and hence I took the responsibility of doing some quick experimentation. Here’s what I found.

• I’m not planning on leaving the industry (yet), but before I go I’d like to offer up what I know when it comes to complaining about web browsers.

• I have logged hundreds of hours complaining about browsers on Twitter, on podcasts, and on this blog. I have logged thousands more hours trying to keep up with browsers and I frequently interact with people who write specs and make browsers. I have not been 100% successful in my efforts to get a <rupert> element as my legacy but I have learned a lot about giving feedback to web browsers.

• The basic concept is that you install the free plugin (available for Chrome), and as you browse English websites the plugin will sneakily and automagically translate a few words into Luxembourgish. The idea is that it will help you expand your vocabulary as you learn new words by context. If you don’t understand a word, just hover over it with your cursor and a translation will appear.

SaaS/Back End/Databases

• No obligation; just checking in to see what my availability is. Quickly thinking it over – I didn’t have any plans tonight, nothing in particular on my agenda. Why not? If I can help then someone else on the team won’t have to, and I don’t have anything better to do tonight.

• A wire protocol is the format for interactions between a database server and its clients. It encompasses authentication, sending queries, receiving responses, and so on. It is a description of the exact bytes sent and received by servers and clients. It does NOT encompass the actual query language itself, let alone database semantics.

Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra

• Just before releasing 3.4, forum member esmourguit sent me updates for the Français (French) langpack PET. I was puzzled that he included .mo files for LibreOffice, as they should have already been there.

Programming/Development

• The research quality this year was frankly exceptional – it’s the strongest year I’ve seen since getting involved back in 2015. This has led to fierce competition for the top 10, and numerous high-standard research papers missing out. I usually name a few of my favourite runners up but this year there’s so many it would be unfair – instead I recommend anyone with time explores the full nomination list. Massive thanks to everyone who contributed to this wave of research!

• One particular theme dominated this year. In both the nominations and the final top ten, we saw heavy focus on HTTP Request Smuggling, and attacks on parser inconsistency in general. As systems get more complex and more connected, these threats bloom. It’ll be interesting to see where the parser battleground shifts when HTTP/1.1 use eventually starts to dwindle in a few decade’s time.

Leftovers

Hardware

• Allwinner T113-S3 is a dual-core Cortex-A7 processor with 128MB DDR3 on-chip memory that is designed for smart control and HMI applications in the automotive and industrial sectors.

• At first glance, the new processor looks quite similar to Allwinner S3, but with twice the number of cores. However there’s more to it, as a a HiFi4 DSP has been added for smart audio applications, the H.264 encoder is gone replaced by an MPJEG encoder, and the company claims support for “industrial level working temperature”, plus a 10-year life cycle. among other differences.

• [Carl] is always looking at making heater plates for PCB reflow and other applications. In his latest video, he shows how he is using thin flexible PCBs with adhesive backs as stickers that get hot. You can find gerber files and design files on GitHub.

• You might think that this is a pretty simple thing to do with a flex PCB, but it turns out while the PCB might be flexible, the traces aren’t and so the typical long traces you see in a heater won’t allow the sticker to bend, which is a problem if you want to wrap it around, say, a coffee mug.

• Even though it’s not the right tool for the job, we’ve all used a flat head screwdriver for other purposes. Admit it — you’ve pried open a thing or two with that one in the toolbox that’s all dirty and dinged up anyway. But oftentimes, screwdrivers just aren’t thin enough. What you need is a spudger, which for some reason, seem to only come in plastic. Blame our disposable times.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• This is a developing story… Check back for possible updates…

• An effort to end the blockade and disperse protesters fully from the area appeared to stall Saturday afternoon as police chose not to arrest demonstrators even as the initial encampment maintained by those opposed to Covid-19 public health rules was cleared.

Integrity/Availability

Proprietary

• One note: if you’re backing up a company account, you may find that your company has disabled Takeout. There are third-party apps that say they can back up your Gmail, but you should check your company’s policies before you try them out.

Security

Privacy/Surveillance

• The CIA has a secret repository of information collected about Americans as part of the agency’s foreign surveillance programs, two Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee alleged on Thursday. The lawmakers said the agency hid from Congress and the public what amounts to “warrantless backdoor searches of Americans.”

• Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.) wrote to CIA Director Bill Burns and Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines in April 2021, calling for details about the program to be declassified. The CIA, they claimed, has “secretly conducted its own bulk program … entirely outside the statutory framework that Congress and the public believe govern this collection.” The program does operate under the authority of Executive Order 12333, which has governed intelligence community activity since 1981, the senators said.

• A tense standoff appeared to be dissolving peacefully before noon and some truckers moved vehicles used in the blockade, but by nightfall the crowd swelled, NBC affiliate WDIV of Detroit reported.

• Hundreds more protesters arrived to bolster crowed in Windsor on Saturday and settled into a face-off with police about two blocks away, waving flags and yelling. While there were no visible physical confrontations, the crowd still controlled the road to the bridge late Saturday.

• The protest continued despite a judge’s order Friday for the protesters to leave and an announcement from Windsor police that they had “commenced enforcement” against blockading demonstrators on the bridge linking Windsor and Detroit.

• Blockades at major U.S.-Canada border crossings caused by truckers protesting COVID-19 vaccine mandates could worsen the existing car shortage that has driven up prices to record levels.

• The skyrocketing cost of cars and trucks — which has played a major role in fueling the nation’s 40-year-high inflation rate — was just beginning to level off before truckers blocked the Ambassador Bridge and with it the most efficient way to transport auto parts between Canada and the U.S.

• Attribution is how advertisers know if their advertising campaigns are working. Attribution generates metrics that allow advertisers to understand how their advertising campaigns are performing. Related measurement techniques also help publishers understand how they are helping advertisers. Though attribution is crucial to advertising, current attribution practices have terrible privacy properties.

• For the last few months we have been working with a team from Meta (formerly Facebook) on a new proposal that aims to enable conversion measurement – or attribution – for advertising called Interoperable Private Attribution, or IPA.

• “The feature is expected to roll out in March 2022 and will be generally available to all global users across Microsoft Teams web and desktop versions,” the company said in a statement.

• The European Publishers Council is accusing Google of anticompetitive digital advertising practices, according to a complaint filed Friday with the European Commission.

• The council is calling on the commission, which is already investigating Google’s advertising technology, to take action against the search giant to “break the stranglehold that Google has over us all.”

Defence/Aggression

• Stephanie Nebehay at Reuters reports that Iraq has finally paid off the $52.4 billion in war reparations imposed on it by the United Nations as punishment for its invasion and attempted annexation of Kuwait in 1990, which led to the Gulf War of 1991.

• The Republican Party’s embrace of fascism is now open and notorious, and impossible to ignore. With the exception of a few stragglers and diehards, the party has been captured by Donald Trump and the MAGA movement he has spawned.

• If you’re the sort of person who follows the news, you’ve probably heard a good bit lately about podcaster Joe Rogan, Neil Young’s fight with Spotify, and maybe a little about Russia and Ukraine.

• Following the one-on-one call between Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin on Saturday, a top Russian official accused the U.S. government of stoking dangerous “hysteria” and blasted anyone leaking unfounded claims about Moscow’s intention to launch an imminent invasion of Ukraine.

• “Hysteria has reached its peak,” Yury Ushakov, Putin’s top foreign policy advisor, told reporters on a conference call following the phone conversation between the two heads of state.

• The mainstream media is, without exception, repeating the unevidenced claim from the Biden administration that Russia is about to invade Ukraine. They do this with no proper journalistic questioning or scepticism. They do this despite the fact that, in the last month, not only have we had repeated cries that invasion is “imminent”, we have had specific secret intelligence sourced claims from the Americans, that a Russian staged false flag attack was about to happen, and from the British, that there was about to be a coup in Kiev led by very minor figures. Both claims turned out to be nonsense.

• During visits to Kabul, Afghanistan, over the past decade, I particularly relished lingering over breakfasts on chilly winter mornings with my young hosts who were on their winter break from school. Seated on the floor, wearing coats and hats and draped with blankets, we’d sip piping hot green tea as we shared fresh, warm wheels of bread purchased from the nearest baker.

• The central bank of Afghanistan pushed back firmly Saturday against an executive order issued a day earlier by U.S. President Joe Biden to seize over $7 billion in foreign exchange assets—a move that humanitarians have denounced as unbelievably cruel given the suffering of the Afghan people as its economy and healthcare systems teeter on the brink of collapse with millions facing starvation and freezing winter temperatures.

• In a statement posted online, Da Afghanistan Bank (DAB) rejected the White House’s claim that the seizure of billions in Foreign Exchange Reserves (FX) was done in the name of humanitarian assistance, instead calling it an “injustice to the people of Afghanistan.”

• Ultimately, the Republican Party’s embrace of fascism is a story about how “respectable,” “establishment” conservatives made bargains and agreements with fringe factions in order to win elections and hold power. Gradually, those supposedly mainstream Republicans gave the political arsonists in their midst the fuel and matches, and then feigned shock and surprise at the resulting conflagration.

Environment

Energy

Finance

• Earlier this month, Sen. Manchin said that the Build Back Better is “dead.” He may want to check in with his constituents back home, because in West Virginia, the fight to build back better is very much alive—and it’s alive across the country too.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• The Republicans are about to win a major battle in their war on electric vehicles, this time with the second largest vehicle fleet in America owned by the US Postal Service. It’s an outrageous story that most Americans don’t know a thing about.

• Republicans who bashed Black Lives Matter demonstrations are now singing the praises of unlawful anti-vax protests wreaking havoc on international commerce

• The primary difference between Huxley’s dystopia and that described by Orwell is the methodology through which humanity is controlled by authoritarian governments. Huxley argued that humans would be tricked into embracing their own enslavement via anti-depressants and various hedonistic distractions, while Orwell held that compliance would more easily be achieved through censorship, mind control, and violence. In a letter to Orwell (his childhood French teacher) upon reading 1984, Huxley insisted that “the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging and kicking them into obedience.” Certainly, Bradbury’s novel features elements of both; citizens in his future are subject to state violence and also pacified by pleasure and drugs. However, the key distinction here, and Bradbury’s great contribution to dystopian literature, is that we would choose our own intellectual enslavement as well.

Censorship/Free Speech

• Under the new policy, which takes effect March 1st, Twitch will remove reported usernames that include “references to sexual acts, arousal, fluids, or genitalia” and references to hard drugs. Alcohol, tobacco, and marijuana are excluded from that list, however. After the deadline, the company says it will suspend users if their usernames are “hateful, harassing, violent or typically representative of malicious behavior.”

Civil Rights/Policing

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• But rather than enjoy my ultra-fast Internet I realized I had a major problem: None of my consumer networking hardware was up to snuff.

Monopolies

Trademarks

• While sales are slow for Méndez and others in her community, Indigenous patterns have exploded in popularity elsewhere: major companies like Zara, Anthropologie, Carolina Herrera, and Mango have incorporated similar designs into their clothing under the pretext of inspiration. Fashion houses have profited without acknowledging the origin of the designs or compensating communities.

Copyrights

• Twenty years ago, screener copies of all Oscar-nominated films leaked online before the official awards ceremony. Today, screeners have become a rare breed. This isn’t only the result of increased anti-piracy protection. In fact, the shift to shorter release windows and streaming premieres likely had a much bigger impact.

Share in other sites/networks: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. Permalink  Send this to a friend

----------

➮ Sharing is caring. Content is available under CC-BY-SA.