● 02.13.22

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 14/2/2022: MariaDB 10.7, KDE Frameworks 5.91.0, and Linux 5.17 RC4

Posted in News Roundup at 8:25 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxDistributionsDevices/EmbeddedFree Software/Open SourceLeftovers

GNU/Linux

• Welcome to this week’s Linux weekly roundup.

• I am still not at my computer, same as last week, but the world of Linux continued to grow in its splendor.

• We had plenty of new releases this week with OpenMandriva 4.3, SparkyLinux 6.2 and, Bluestar Linux 5.16.8.

• KDE Plasma 5.24 has also been released this week.

Audiocasts/Shows

• Josh and Kurt talk to Hayley Tsukayama from the EFF about privacy. We all know privacy in the modern age is very complicated and difficult. Normal people don’t have many allies when it comes to privacy. The EFF has been blazing the trail for digital rights for more than 30 years! This episode has a ton of amazing details, it’s easy to see how the EFF became the jewel of the Internet.

• Picking a new Linux distro can be fairly time consuming so how about we eliminate the need to choose and let someone or something else do it, this is distrochooser which will do exactly that.

Kernel Space

• The 5.17-rc4 kernel prepatch is out for testing. “Things continue to look pretty normal for 5.17. Both the diffstat and the number of commits looks pretty much average for an rc4 release.”

Graphics Stack

• FOSDEM 2022 took place this past weekend, on February 5th and 6th. It was a virtual event for the second year in a row, but this year the Graphics devroom made a comeback and I participated in it with a talk titled “Fun with border colors in Vulkan”. In the talk, I explained the context and origins behind the VK_EXT_border_color_swizzle extension that was published last year and in which I’m listed as one of the contributors.

• Big kudos and a big thank you to the FOSDEM organizers one more year. FOSDEM is arguably the most important free and open source software conference in Europe and one of the most important FOSS conferences in the world. It’s run entirely by volunteers, doing an incredible amount of work that makes it possible to have hundreds of talks and dozens of different devrooms in the span of two days. Special thanks to the Graphics devroom organizers.

• For the virtual setup, one more year FOSDEM relied on Matrix. It’s great because at Igalia we also use Matrix for our internal communications and, thanks to the federated nature of the service, I could join the FOSDEM virtual rooms using the same interface, client and account I normally use for work. The FOSDEM organizers also let participants create ad-hoc accounts to join the conference, in case they didn’t have a Matrix account previously. Thanks to Matrix widgets, each virtual devroom had its corresponding video stream, which you could also watch freely on their site, embedded in each of the virtual devrooms, so participants wanting to watch the talks and ask questions had everything in a single page.

• AMD’s newest Linux kernel series have contained USB4 DisplayPort Tunneling and additional USB4/Thunderbolt employment. The company’s latest endeavor is restructuring several Linux kernels around an “is_thunderbolt” check utilized by drivers within their kernel. This new technology will modify the device’s behavior due to it being linked to a Thunderbolt port rather than presently connected to the PCIe to resolve if the device is removable or connected externally from the machine. That is_thunderbolt check started for early Intel Thunderbolt controllers that lacked command completed events. The USB4 DisplayPort Tunneling will take that identical signal and transform it into packets that can be transmitted along the USB-C cable instantaneously. This technology will allow fewer hardware devices and enable numerous signals to travel in an individual cable.

Applications

• OBS Studio 27.2 is the second major update in the 27.x series, after OBS Studio 27.1, bringing several exciting new features for Linux users, such as official Flatpak support so you can more easily install the software on your favorite GNU/Linux distribution. One package format to rule them all!

• Also for Linux users, the new OBS Studio release alphabetically sorts the list of windows shown when selecting Window Capture as the source, makes PipeWire capturing more robust, especially in multi-GPU setups, and introduces a framework that paves the way for upcoming support of background hotkeys on Wayland.

• International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) is an American multinational technology corporation headquartered in Armonk, New York. They sell computer hardware, middleware and software employing over 370,000 people.

• IBM acquired Red Hat in 2019. But you can trace IBM’s history of open source far further back. They were one of the earliest champions of open source, backing influential communities like Linux, Apache, and Eclipse, advocating open licenses, open governance, and open standards.

• IBM also collaborates with Linux organisations. For example, IBM works with Ubuntu in areas like containers, virtualization, Infrastructure-as-a-Service, big data analytics and DevOps to provide reference architectures, support solutions and cloud offerings, both for enterprise data centres and cloud service providers.

• The company is involved in many open source projects. For example, they helped to create the Apache Software Foundation, and were also a founder member of the OpenJS Foundation, responsible for the development of the Node.js platform, Appium, Dojo, jQuery and many other products.

• [...]

• OSSIM provides a unified platform with many of the essential security capabilities including: asset discovery, vulnerability assessment, intrusion detection, behavioral monitoring, and SIEM event correlation.

Instructionals/Technical

• Htop is a free, open-source, cross-platform interactive process viewer. It is a text-mode application (for console or X terminals) and requires ncurses. The terminal UI is a great way to see what your system looks like inside, both in terms of processes and other info. It’s also completely customizable, so you can change colors or add different widgets for more visual representation!

• In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install Htop Interactive Process Viewer on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS desktop or server.

• Today we are looking at how to install Polyphone 2.2 on a Chromebook. Please follow the video/audio guide as a tutorial where we explain the process step by step and use the commands below.

• This tutorial will only work on Chromebooks with an Intel or AMD CPU (with Linux Apps Support) and not those with an ARM64 architecture CPU.

• LibreOffice is a free, open-source office productivity suite used by millions worldwide. The office suite software uses a native file format ODF or Open Document Format, an accepted and almost required structure in multiple organizations across the globe.

• LibreOffice includes Writer (word processing), Calc (spreadsheets), Impress (presentations), Draw (vector graphics and flowcharts), Base (databases), and Math (formula editing).

• As many know, AlmaLinux does have recent versions of LibreOffice, but given the distribution is a downstream version of RHEL and focuses on stability over new features, when new LibreOffice releases occur, you may not see these straight away. Luckily, using alternative installation managers can achieve you getting the latest version and keep it up to date.

• Timeshift is a powerful open-source tool that can help you protect your data. It allows you to create incremental snapshots of your filesystem, which can be browsed with a file manager. In BTRFS mode, snapshots are taken using the in-built features of the BTRFS filesystem. If you’re looking for a reliable way to back up your data.

• Timeshift is worth considering for all users as it is handy when you need to restore which happens often with Linux systems when you start off learning amongst many other examples.

• In this video, we are looking at how to install Blender on Zorin OS 16.

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Zabbix on AlmaLinux 8. For those of you who didn’t know, Zabbix is a free and open-source tool used to provide robust and real-time monitoring for network monitoring and application monitoring of millions of metrics. Zabbix uses XML based template which contains elements to monitor. The backend of Zabbix is written in C programming and PHP is used for the web frontend.

• 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 Zabbix open source monitoring tool on an AlmaLinux 8. You can follow the same instructions for Fedora, RHEL, CentOS, and Rocky Linux distributions.

• Want to display your avatar icon in the top-right corner system menu? Here’s an extension to do the job for Ubuntu 20.04, Ubuntu 21.10, and Debian 11 with GNOME desktop.

• You know, many Linux desktops (e.g., KDE Plasma and Cinnamon) display the icon/figure of user account in the system start menu.

• GNOME however does not have the classic style ‘start menu’ by default. Instead, user may add the avatar icon into upper-right corner system tray drop-down menu (aka system menu).

• htop is free and open-source software that helps the user in viewing the running process and monitoring the consumption of system resources. Here we learn the commands to install htop viewer on Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy JellyFish or Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Focal Fossa.

• Get a dynamic overview of your running processes and the system resources using htop. Well, that can be done with the classic command-top but compared to that this process manager offers some comfort functions and ncurses interface and can be operated easily with the keyboard without having to type long commands. If htop is started in a terminal within a desktop environment, the mouse can also be used. If you want to use the mouse in a virtual terminal, gpm must be installed.

• Use these Linux Bash shortcuts for navigation, editing, command control, and easy access to history—all available in a free cheat sheet.

• The Linux Bash (Bourne Again Shell) is a shell and command language that is known to most Linux users, since it’s the default shell in most Linux distributions.

• A beginner Linux user may find the Linux terminal usage a bit hard to grasp, especially because it relies heavily on using your arrow keys to move around. Additionally, constantly re-typing the commands, each with a slight variation, can be annoying.

Wine or Emulation

•  Emulation is the practice of using a program (called an emulator) on a PC to mimic the behaviour of a home computer or a video game console, in order to play (usually retro) games on a computer.

• Home computers were a class of microcomputers that entered the market in 1977 and became common during the 1980s. They were marketed to consumers as affordable and accessible computers that, for the first time, were intended for the use of a single non-technical user.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

•  KDE Frameworks 5.91 is here with lots of interesting and exciting changes, starting with a major new feature for the Dolphin file manager and other KDE apps that use the KIO library. This is PolKit support in KIO, which finally enables root file operations in Dolphin.

• In addition, the KIO library was improved in this release to correctly handle non-file-based URLs registered to apps, such as tg:// for Telegram links or mailto:// for email addresses, when the apps advertise that they accept URLs. Also, Dolphin now launches faster when there are multiple ISO images mounted or Snap apps installed.

• KDE today announces the release of KDE Frameworks 5.91.0.

• KDE Frameworks are 83 addon libraries to Qt which provide a wide variety of commonly needed functionality in mature, peer reviewed and well tested libraries with friendly licensing terms. For an introduction see the KDE Frameworks release announcement.

• This release is part of a series of planned monthly releases making improvements available to developers in a quick and predictable manner.

• In my previous blogpost, I wrote that I’ll be working on extending the Ellipse Assistant Tool to add support for Perspective Ellipse in Krita. However, last week my mentors and I decided that as of now, it makes more sense to add a new Assistant Tool for Perspective Ellipse instead of extending the Ellipse Assistant Tool.

Distributions

• I mentioned that Roger’s (radky in the forum) JWMDesk PET is not in EasyOS 3.4 due to incompatibility with the format of /root/.jwmrc-tray and /root/.jwm/jwmrc-personal.

New Releases

• GNS3 : docker VM : add the shared folder “/hosthome” to access to “/home/user” of LiveRaizo

Slackware Family

• A spin-off from our previous Episode in this series is this fifth article about using Slackware as your private/personal ‘cloud server’.

• Check out the list below which shows past, present and future episodes in the series, if the article has already been written you’ll be able to click on the subject.

• The first episode also contains an introduction with some more detail about what you can expect.

• These articles are living documents, i.e. based on readers’ feedback I may add, update or modify their content.

• [...]

• In the previous Episode called “Productivity Platform” I have shown you how to setup the NextCloud platform on your Slackware server. I had promised a separate article about the addition of “collaborative editing” and this is it.

• Collaborative editing on documents allows people from all over the world to have the exact same document (text, spreadsheet, presentation, vector graphics) open in a web-based online editor and collaborate on its content in real-time. Every editor can see what the others are currently working on. The most widely used online office suite with these capabilities is Microsoft Office 365.

• Of course, Microsoft 365 is not free. It uses a license model where you pay for its use per month. If you stop paying… you lose access to your online office suite and if you are unlucky, you lose access to your OneDrive files as well.

• How is the situation in the Open Source world? Looking for free and open (source as well as standards-adhering!) desktop office programs, many people acknowledge that Libreoffice is an important OSOSS (Open Standards & Open Source Software) alternative to Microsoft’s Office line of programs. However… a cloud-native online web-based variant of the LibreOffice suite of programs is not trivially accessible. By nature, online software needs to be hosted somewhere and by extension, the documents you edit online need to be maintained on cloud storage as well… a challenge for free software enthusiasts when the truth is that hosting costs money. The commercially successful Microsoft Office 365 has the dominant position there.

• Now, this article is going to free you (a bit) from Big Tech. I will show you how to enrich your personal Slackware Cloud Server with exactly that what seems unattainable for free software lovers: a web-based online version of LibreOffice which makes it possible for you and yours to (jointly if you want) edit the documents that you are already hosting in your NextCloud accounts.

IBM/Red Hat/Fedora

• Back in mid November I proposed a change for Fedora 37 to retire ARMv7 as an architecture, FESCo accepted the proposal. Per the Fedora 36 schedule we branched Fedora 36 this week. Last night I enacted the last of the process to disable it in rawhide so to quote “It’s dead Jim”. The last release of Fedora to support ARMv7 AKA armhfp AKA arm32 will be Fedora 36 which will go end of life around June 2023.

• I thought I’d cover a few of the things we achieved with Fedora ARM and some of the impact it’s had on the wider Linux on ARM ecosystem which people may not have realised.

• Do you want to create your first Fedora package but don’t know where to start? Try RPM Spec Wizard, it will guide you through the process.

• If you asked me how to create a Fedora package, I would probably point you to the RPM Packaging Guide, Fedora Packaging Guidelines, or this Packaging Workshop for Beginners recording from Miroslav Suchý. Upon realizing that your options are an 80 pages document, a comprehensive specification so long, that nobody ever read it in its entirety, and a lecture with a length of a feature film, you wouldn’t like me very much.

• While those are great learning resources, they can be a little bit too overwhelming for a first-time contributor. That is why we created RPM Spec Wizard. It is an interactive guide that you can simply open, and step by step, input the information that it asks for.

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

• Hi everyone, below you will find the updates from the Desktop team from the last week. If you’re interested in discussing a topic please start a thread in the Desktop area of Discourse .

• Last week’s notes are here: Desktop Team Updates – Monday 31st January 2022

Devices/Embedded

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

SaaS/Back End/Databases

• MariaDB 10.7 is an evolution of MariaDB 10.6 with several entirely new features not found anywhere else.

• MariaDB is a popular database server made by the original authors of MySQL. It is a community-developed fork of MySQL and is one of the most widely used open-source relational database management systems (RDBMS). MariaDB is highly compatible with MySQL and allows users to effortlessly migrate databases from MySQL to MariaDB.

Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

Open Access/Content

• A key insight here is that these more advanced steps involve making changes which are apparent to “typical” users as well, but we’ll expand on that in a moment. Instead of designing for people like you and then patching it up until it’s semi-functional for people who are not like you, a wise developer places themselves into the shoes of the person they’re designing for and builds something which speaks their design language. For visually impaired users, this might mean laying out information in a more logical sense than in a spatial sense.

• Importantly, accessibility also means understanding that there are many other kinds of users who have accessibility needs.

• For instance, consider someone who cannot afford a computer as nice as the one your developers are using. When your Electron crapware app eats up 8G of RAM, it may be fine on your 32G developer workstation, but not so much for someone who cannot afford anything other than a used $50 laptop from eBay. Waking up the user’s phone every 15 minutes to check in with your servers isn’t very nice for someone using a 5-year-old phone with a dying battery. Your huge JavaScript bundle, unoptimized images, and always-on network requirements are not accessible to users who are on low-bandwidth mobile connections or have a data cap — you’re essentially charging them an extra tax to use your website.

• Localization is another kind of accessibility, and it requires more effort than running your strings through gettext. Users in different locales speak not only different natural languages, but different design langauges. Users of right-to-left languages like Arabic don’t just reverse their strings but also the entire layout of the page. Chinese and Japanese users are more familiar with denser UIs than the typical Western user. And subtitles and transcripts are important for Deaf users, but also useful for users who are consuming your content in a second language.

Programming/Development

Perl/Raku

• These are some answers to the Week 151 of the Perl Weekly Challenge organized by Mohammad S. Anwar.

Leftovers

Hardware

• We’ve all seen those “river” tables where a lovely old piece of tree is filled with some blue resin to create a water-like aesthetic. This project from [smartyleowl] takes that basic idea, but pushes it further, and the result is a beautiful build that is as much a diorama as it is a simple lamp.

• First up, an appropriate rough piece of unprepared wood is chosen to create a cliff for the underwater scene. Speckles of UV-reactive blue powder are scattered on to the wood and some little plastic coral and marine plants are stuck down as well. A mold is then constructed around the wood using acrylic. Small whale and diver figurines are dangled in place, and blue resin poured in to complete the underwater scene. Once the resin has hardened, it’s polished to a clear sheen and its edges are nicely beveled. It’s then placed on a illuminated base which lights the scene from below, giving it a somewhat ethereal underwater quality.

• Millimeter-wave Radars used in modern cars for cruise control and collision avoidance are usually designed to work at ranges on the order of 100 meters or so. With some engineering nous, however, experimenters have gotten these devices sending signals over ranges of up to 60 km in some tests. [Machining and Microwaves] decided to see if he could push the boat out even further, and set out machining some waveguide combiner cavities so he could use the radar chips with some very high-performance antennas.

• Prolific hacker [Sulfuroid] is a medical doctor by day, and an electronics hobbyist by night, and quite how he finds the time, we have no idea.

• The project we want to highlight is an ESP32 based LED smart watch, which we’ll sure you’ll agree, looks pretty nicely developed so far, and [Sulfuroid] has bigger plans, as you may find, when you dig into the GitHub repo. This analog-style design uses four groups of 0603-sized LEDs, arranged circularly to indicate the passage of time, or anything else you fancy. Since there are four control buttons, a pancake vibration motor, as well as Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, the possibilities are endless.

• [The Action Lab] had a very serious technical problem. His daughter wanted to 3D print sparkly unicorns. But how do you make a 3D print sparkly? Turns out, he had used a diffraction grating before to make rainbow-enhanced chocolate.

• The method turns out to be surprisingly simple. Using a diffraction grating as a print bed, puts the pattern on the bottom of the 3D print and — thanks to how a diffraction grating works — the 3D print now works like a grating, too.

• [...]

• The real test, of course, was the daughter test. Judging from the video, she was pretty happy with the results. The white pieces seem to look best, but the technique also worked with colored PLA. Technically, these are called surface relief gratings, to differentiate them from other kinds of diffraction gratings. In the 1600s, people noticed the effect in bird feathers and a hundred or so years later, they were duplicating the effect with fine hairs. It would be the 1800s before science started to explain what was really going on.

Integrity/Availability

Proprietary

Security

Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt/Fear-mongering/Dramatisation

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