● 02.15.22

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 16/2/2022: xf86-input-wacom 1.0

Posted in News Roundup at 7:42 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxDistributionsDevices/EmbeddedFree Software/Open SourceLeftovers

GNU/Linux

Desktop/Laptop

• Linux’s resourcefulness as a functional operating system can’t be undermined. Its open-source nature and the vast number of distros available make Linux a preferred choice for beginners and advanced users alike.

• Nevertheless, most Linux distros offer commendable and transcendental desktop experiences. Each distro might be unique in its offering, but some are highly exceptional, given their layout and graphical interfaces.

• If you are a beauty admirer and are looking for some classy, eye-catching, and popular Linux distros, you have to check out these eight distros that offer a visually-appealing interface out-of-the-box.

• I have a set of Elgato key lights that I use when filming and I love them: they’re very nice lights that give great coverage and colour.

• Part of what makes these particular lights practical and popular is their wireless control. In fact, you can only control these lights wirelessly. The problem with that? Eh, Elgato only make the ‘Elgato Control Center’ software for Windows and macOS (though are mobile apps for Android and iOS too).

• Since I typically use my phone to wirelessly control my Panasonic LUMIX camera (which requires connecting to a custom local wireless network the camera creates) I can’t use my phone to also control the Elgato lights (as you need to be on the same wireless network as them).

• Open source to the rescue!

Server

• If you are a beginner Linux user, then you may be wondering about the difference between Debian and Ubuntu servers. Both of these versions are popular among Linux users, but they have some key differences. In this blog post, we will take a look at the basic technical differences between Debian vs Ubuntu servers, as well as their pros and cons. We will also help you decide which one is right for you!

• There are many reasons why you should learn Linux OS. One of the biggest advantages is that Linux is open-source, which means that you can freely download and use it for any purpose. Additionally, Linux is very stable and secure, making it a great choice for servers. It also runs on a wide range of devices, from desktops and laptops to tablets and smartphones.

• Kubernetes are getting more pivotal in this era of cloud computing due to the efficiency they provide to developers who can now build and deploy application environments more easily using containerization.

• Monitoring and securing these containers is a lot more difficult than managing databases and the whole process can sound more daunting than it should be. Especially since their clusters can be hazardous if they’re not properly managed.

• Today’s article brings you a list of several free and open-source Kubernetes tools with which, mixed with professional insight, efficient monitoring, and sufficient resources, your work can be a walk in the park.

Audiocasts/Shows

• In this video, I am going to show an overview of Ubuntu Cinnamon Remix 21.10 and some of the applications pre-installed.

• Trust is a very important aspect of security, but who/what exactly should you trust? How about no one? Join Jay and Joao for episode 18 of the Enterprise Linux Security show, as they discuss Zero Trust Security.

• In the Linux community, there’s constant debate about which distribution is best for your desktop. However, there’s not as much discussion regarding Linux distros for your server. There are many good options for your Linux server project, and in this video Jay discusses his top 6 choices.

Kernel Space

Graphics Stack

• After roughly 20 years and counting up to 0.40 in release numbers, I’ve decided to call the next version of the xf86-input-wacom driver the 1.0 release. [1] This cycle has seen a bulk of development (>180 patches) which is roughly as much as the last 12 releases together. None of these patches actually added user-visible features, so let’s talk about technical dept and what turned out to be an interesting way of reducing it.

• The wacom driver’s git history goes back to 2002 and the current batch of maintainers (Ping, Jason and I) have all been working on it for one to two decades. It used to be a Wacom-only driver but with the improvements made to the kernel over the years the driver should work with most tablets that have a kernel driver, albeit some of the more quirky niche features will be more limited (but your non-Wacom devices probably don’t have those features anyway).

• The one constant was always: the driver was extremely difficult to test, something common to all X input drivers. Development is a cycle of restarting the X server a billion times, testing is mostly plugging hardware in and moving things around in the hope that you can spot the bugs. On a driver that doesn’t move much, this isn’t necessarily a problem. Until a bug comes along, that requires some core rework of the event handling – in the kernel, libinput and, yes, the wacom driver.

Applications

• OBS Studio is the incredibly popular free and open source video capture and livestreaming software. A huge new release is now available with plenty of Linux improvements.

• This is the first release to offer full official Flatpak / Flathub support, which means users across pretty much any Linux distribution get any easy way to install. Not only that, because it’s an official package, you also get proper service integration. For example, instead of entering a streaming key for Twitch, you can login and get all the goodies without any fuss.

• Busybox is described on its manual page as the swiss army knife of embedded Linux. It combines small versions of common UNIX utilities into a single small executable. It provides around 400 implementations of Linux commands such as more, less, head, tail, grep, awk, sed, dpkg, all compiled into a single binary.

• This executable is small in size (below 1MB) and thus useful in situations whereby we are limited in terms of disk space e.g running an entire temporary operating system on a RAM disk, embedded systems, mobile devices, and such.

• Busybox looks at the name by which it is called by and will act according to the desired program, for example if we call busybox through a symbolic link ls, it will perform an action resembling ls command similarly if we call it through the mkdir symbolic link, it performs actions similar to mkdir.

• I’m a KDE user, and for years I’ve been on a seemingly endless journey of discovery with the Plasma Desktop. If you were to ask me in public, I’d probably claim to know everything there is to know about the desktop I use every day of my life. But in truth, I’ve actually only just scratched the surface. It seems every day I learn a new KDE trick that either makes my life easier or just more fun, and my latest discovery is the konsolekalendar command, which lets you view and manage an iCal calendar from the terminal.

Instructionals/Technical

• PIP is a utility that manages software packages such as libraries and dependencies for the development modules of Python. In this short tutorial, you will learn how to install pip on Ubuntu 18.04 or 20.04.

• LAMP is a collection of open-source software commonly used to serve web applications that have been around since the late 1990s. LAMP is an acronym that stands for Linux, Apache, MySQL/MariaDB, and PHP and provides the components needed to host and manage web content and is still arguably the most utilized stack deployment for developers and web applications today.

• In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install the LAMP stack (Apache, MariaDB/MySQL, PHP) on AlmaLinux 8 Workstation or Server.

• Qlipper is a lightweight, open-source, and cross-platform clipboard history applet, which helps the user to get back any copied path. The key task of Qlippper will not consume many resources on your PC while monitoring it for recent data that can be used again later if needed!

• With Qlipper, you can quickly view your clipboard history and make items in it the selected one. To clear all past content, just right-click on its icon within the system tray or press Control+Alt+V for viewing history.

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

• Ansible consists of different types of modules to perform different types of tasks required for Ansible to work. These modules help to perform almost all the tasks in Ansible. These Ansible modules are directly connected to the Ansible hosts or nodes and perform the tasks on those nodes. Some of the most popular modules are apt, yum, shell, raw, command, and many more. In this article, we will discuss the difference between the two modules that are commonly used in Ansible. These modules are command and shell modules. In many ways, both of them have the same task and look similar, but if we go deeper into the actions, there are many differences between them.

• Beekeeper Studio might be a perfect choice for those looking for an easy-to-use and comprehensive GUI electron front end for database management. This open-source database GUI can easily connect with any MariaDB or Postgres and works well alongside other popular databases such as MySQL, CockroachDB, Amazon Redshift, SQLite, and SQL DB. Currently, Beekeeper Studio only supports TCP connections for PSQL or MySQL, not the Unix socket connections.

• Beekeeper Studio comes equipped with all sorts of useful features you would expect in a quality SQL program: autocomplete functionality includes completable queries without having to make multiple trips back-and-forth between programs; there’s even live reflection on what your query will do right before it finishes running so that minor mistakes don’t go unnoticed while typing.

• With the new TCP Bottleneck Bandwidth and RRT (BBR) algorithm, Google has finally found a way to overcome many issues that were previously present in both Reno & CUBIC. This updated congestion control algorithm achieves significant bandwidth improvements and lowers latency, and is deployed by Google.com, Google Cloud Platform, Youtube, and others.

• In the following tutorial, you will learn how to enable TCP BBR on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy Jellyfish.

• In this tutorial, you will learn how to install ownCloud server on Ubuntu 22.04. ownCloud is a collaboration tool that allows you to easily and securely share files and folders with others.

• Odoo is an open-source and full suite of business apps including, ERP, CRM, Finance, Human resource, and more. It is available in different editions depending on what’s right for you. It can be used for a lot of different industries including, Sales, Operations, Manufacturing, Marketing, Human resource, Finance and more. The biggest strengths of Odoo is integrated scalability, user-friendly, flexible, and customizable. It is written in Python and helps you manage your business and be more efficient wherever you are.

• Numerous modern web applications fancy the use of a document database to store data; a case exhibited by MongoDB. The no traditional table-based relational database structure classifies MongoDB as a NoSQL database. It instead embraces dynamic schemas through the use of JSON-like documents.

• With MongoDB, there is no need for a predefined schema for data to be stored on a database. The MongoDB schema is open to altercations and updates making it unnecessary to set up a new database whenever new project specifications need implementation.

• This article will walk us through the installation and configuration of MongoDB on Ubuntu 22.04 and Ubuntu 20.04. Before proceeding, make sure you have root user access or you are a Sudoer user on the system you are using.

• Commands to install WebVirtCloud on Ubuntu 20.04 to provide KVM with a web-based graphical user interface.

• WebVirtCloud is a free and open-source project that offers a GUI web interface for the command-line KVM virtualization of Linux systems. Well, if you don’t know about the KVM – stands for Kernel Virtual Machine. It is a Type-1 Hypervisor that uses the kernel of Linux to offer the virtualization environment. Whereas VirtualBox and Vmware Workstation are Type-2 hypervisors where the Guest OS doesn’t have direct as to hardware.

• An advantage of KVM is that the guest systems run at almost native speeds, i.e the guest system responds almost as quickly as a native system.

• To manage and communicate KVM using the tools like Virt Manager we required Libvirt, a virtualization management layer. And the same Libvirt API is used by the WebVirtCloud web UI to manage KVM.

• In this post, you learn how to set up an Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) cluster in Amazon Web Services (AWS).

• EKS is a managed container service to run and scale Kubernetes in the cloud or on-premises. Kubernetes provides a scalable, distributed way to manage workloads. It does this by containerizing applications. Containers ensure replicability across different environments and cloud infrastructures.

• The clusters you create in this post will be used in later posts in our Continuous Integration series, to set up web applications and as part of workflows.

• Nowadays, there are plenty of ways to transfer files using cloud services. Even so, the most secure way to do it isn’t using Dropbox, Google Drive, or anything like that.

• If you want the ultimate security when moving files from computer to computer, you’ll need to know how to SCP in Linux. Here’s how.

• Learn the steps to install TimeShift on Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy JellyFish and Ubuntu 20.04 Focal Fossa using the command terminal.

• Linux system installation and setup is not a difficult task but if you are new to it then issuing any wrong command could cause some error that would be difficult for you to resolve. In such a case, if a person has a backup of the system then restoring it to the earlier point when everything was working is quite easy using TimeShift. Even an experienced user can use it to remove the headache of installing a Linux from scratch if something goes wrong.

• Now that you know what netcat is , it is time for some basic operations and real life tasks with the TCP/IP swiss army knife. Linux distributions come with Netcat already compiled and installed but I will cover how to install and use Netcat in ubuntu.

• You can choose to install Netcat with the ‘apt-get install’ command or compile and install it from the source. The second method is not as easy as the first one and requires some basic knowledge about the Linux command line, commands such as tar, make, and install. The first method is very easy to use and friendly for beginners. Open a new terminal window and type ‘sudo apt-get install netcat’ as shown in Figure 1.

• PHP is the most widely used programming language on the web. PHP 7 was released with a slew of new features and performance enhancements, and its successor, PHP 8, is even better. PHP 8.1.x is the most recent PHP build, released earlier this year.

• If you are starting a new PHP project, it is highly recommended that you have the most recent version installed. If not, we’ll show you how to upgrade to PHP 8.1 in Debian 9, 10, or 11. If you’re using Ubuntu, check out this article on how to install/upgrade to the most recent PHP version in Ubuntu or derivatives.

• If your PHP application is built upon an older PHP version, make sure that it supports the latest . WordPress, the most popular content management system and Laravel, a great PHP framework supports PHP 8.

• When I started writing bash scripts, I realized that one operation I am often dealing with every script is handling date and time. I have done many operations like naming a file/directory with date, fetching API result, and transforming the epoch value to date/time suitable for the application, manipulating date column in CSV files, etc. If you are a beginner for Bash scripting, this article will help in understanding how to use date command in Bash scripting, how to work with date and time using date command in shell scripts, how to manipulate them and do various operations with it in Linux.

• You should have a basic understanding of how a system date and time is set. This part will mostly be taken care of by the server admin in your work.

• But if you are an individual user and using Linux in your personal machine, then you should have an understanding of how date and time are set, ways to synchronize them, and how to modify it.

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install CMake on Debian 11. For those of you who didn’t know, CMake is a free, open-source, cross-platform family of tools designed to build, test, and package software. CMake is used to control the software compilation process using simple platform and compiler-independent configuration files, and generate native makefiles and workspaces that can be used in the compiler environment of your choice.

• 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 CMake on a Debian 11 (Bullseye).

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install InvoicePlane on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, InvoicePlane is a free-to-use invoicing and customer management web application that makes it possible for almost any individual or business to issue out invoices on demand. It is used by many organizations and freelancers to manage their payments and invoices. It offers custom templates, themes, and other tools that help you to increase the functionality of InvoicePlane. It also supports multiple languages and multiple payment providers such as Paypal, or even Bitcoin via Coinbase.

• 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 the step-by-step installation of the InvoicePlane on Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal Fossa). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 18.04, 16.04, and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint.

• OBS Studio is a Free and open-source software for Video recording and Live Streaming, it is available for Windows, Linux, and Mac.

• OBS released a new version 27.2, with many features, Bug-fixes, and improvements.

• This tutorial will be helpful for beginners to download and install OBS Studio 27.2 on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, Ubuntu 21.10, LinuxMint 20.3, Fedora 35, and AlmaLinux 8.

• A collection of tips to let you know how to check disk space usage of Docker Images, Containers and Volumes on your Linux server host.

• R is a programming language and environment for statistical computing and graphics. It can be considered as a different implementation of the S language with much of the S code running unaltered in R. R provides a wide variety of statistical (linear and nonlinear modeling, classical statistical tests, time-series analysis, classification, clustering) and graphical techniques.

• PHP is a recursive acronym for Hypertext Processor. It is an open-source general-purpose scripting language that is widely used in web development because of its ability to be embedded in HTML. A scripting language is used to write pre-written programs that are later used to automate tasks. PHP scripts are commonly used on Linux, Unix, Windows, Mac OS, and other operating systems. When using PHP in web development, you are free to choose your web server and the underlying operating system.

• This article describes step-by-step how to install PHP versions 5.6, 8.0 and 8.1 on your Ubuntu. After installing the two versions, it also explains how you can disable one version and enable another version as the default version for the system. We have run the commands and procedures mentioned in this article on an Ubuntu 20.04 LTS system. The same commands will work on the old Ubuntu 18.04 LTS version as well.

• In this article, we use the Ubuntu command line, the terminal, to install and configure PHP. You can open the Terminal application using either the System Dash or the Ctrl+Alt+t key combination.

• AWS S3 event notification helps us to receive notifications when certain events take place in an S3 Bucket. We can enable available Amazon S3 bucket events to send a notification message. So, whenever the specified event takes place in S3 Bucket, the event is triggered and notifications are sent.

• In this article, we will see how to get notified on Email when certain events take place on our S3 Bucket.

• Yarn is a package manager for Node (Node.js) and is intended as a replacement for npm (node package manager). Instead of installing from a registry, Yarn installs packages from other nodes on your network that have already downloaded the packages. This speeds up the installation for projects with many node modules. Yarn has some advantages: First, it tells you which version of an installed package is compatible with your project. Second, it makes your packages more secure by calculating checksums of each package so in case a developer installs an outdated or corrupt package, Yarn can detect the it.

• It’s not easy to say whether Yarn is better than npm but if you search for an easy-to-use package manager, yarn might be the right choice.

• This tutorial will show you step-by-step on how to Install yarn on Debian 11. We cover two different methods, first we install yarn using the install script from Node Source, then we will install yarn using apt.

• KVM refers to the Kernel-based Virtual Machine which helps to run multiple Linux or window-based isolated guests along with their own OS and virtual dedicated hardware. To run KVM we need processors with hardware virtualization extensions, such as AMD-V or Intel-VT and as it was originally designed for x86 processors, so having x86 processors is quite preferable.

• Python is a programming language that was created with one goal in mind: to make it easy for anyone, not matter their skill level or experience as far as computer science goes. Developed over 30 years ago by Guido van Rossum and still evolving today under an ever-watchful eye (but never too much), this innovative system of codes allows users access tools they need without having any previous knowledge about how things work underneath them all – making success possible at every turn!

• Gradle is a general-purpose build tool that is popular with Java developers. It has a simple syntax that makes it easy to learn, and it can be used to build a wide variety of projects, from simple Java applications to complex enterprise systems. One of the things that makes Gradle so popular is its flexibility. It can be used to build projects of any size and complexity, and it can be customized to meet the specific needs of your project. Additionally, Gradle is well-supported by the development community, with a large number of plugins available that add extra functionality.

• Cockpit is free and open-source software that provides a web-based graphical interface for Linux servers and appliances (such as firewalls and network switches).

• Anaconda is an open-source package manager and distribution of Python. It is designed for machine learning and data science and comprises several open-source packages. In this tutorial, we will walk you through the steps for the installation of Anaconda on a Rocky Linux 8 or CentOS 8 system.

Games

• It seems more Linux ports from Feral Interactive are no longer advertised on Steam, with the latest being Tomb Raider (2013).

• This follows on from the same happening with Mad Max and Shadow of Mordor in Early 2021. Much the same, the Linux version is no longer advertised but it is still available to install. Later that year in April 2021, Feral did bring out Total War: ROME REMASTERED but then we also saw that Feral confirmed in July 2021, that they would no longer be porting A Total War Saga: TROY to Linux – citing “generally less demand for native titles since Valve’s launch of Proton”.

• Want to know how much of your own Steam Library is currently compatible with the Steam Deck? Well, there’s now a website dedicated to doing exactly that.

• It’s called CheckMyDeck (great name) and all you need to do is grab your SteamID, enter it and it will do all the work for you. You can find your SteamID easily using this other website. The main thing to keep in mind though, is that compatibility is an ever-changing thing, with Valve adding to the list almost daily. We mentioned only a few days ago how Verified + Playable together hit 520 games, well as of right now it’s already jumped up to 591!

• Re-Logic clearly aren’t done with Terraria, even with them previously saying they were. Liars! But we’ll totally forgive them of course because we love Terraria.

• Between 2022-02-08 and 2022-02-15 there were 34 new Steam games with Native Linux clients. For reference, during the same time, there were 260 games released for Windows on Steam, so the Linux versions represent about 13.1 % of total released titles.

• Another quick update about the Steam Deck. Apparently another (outlaw?) developer has leaked the details of the contents of a SteamOS update (dated 11th of February 2022) for the Steam Deck.

• ABRISS is an atmospheric physics-destruction building game. You build up huge structures, to then have them smash into other structures and it looks pretty fancy.

• ABRISS is an atmospheric physics-destruction building game. You build up huge structures, to then have them smash into other structures and it looks pretty fancy.

• It’s all about building to destroy. During the game you unlock more parts to destroy more, all set across “digital-brutalist cityscapes”. Seems like there will be plenty of variety on what you can build to from rockets to giant smashing hammers that crash through everything. ABRISS is all about showing off how great you can be at making a big ol’ mess.

• Two things to note: not only does art of rally have a native Linux version that’s worked great every time we had a race on it, it’s also a Deck Verified title – this means that it’s been through the official certification by Valve. This means it will work out of the box on the Steam Deck, with good performance and everything working as expected.

• Superliminal, the brilliant puzzle game where your perspective changes the size of things you hold to progress recently gained some multiplayer modes – and now they’re on Linux too.

• We contacted the developer today, who gave a very clear confirmation that it will support Linux.

• [Taylor] wanted to join the cool kids club and build a macropad for CAD work and video editing, but didn’t want to do it the traditional way with an Arduino. We can get behind that. In fact, [Taylor] wanted to reuse some old piece of tech if possible, which is even better. With a little luck, they found a used gaming mouse with a set of 12 tiny macro buttons on the side that were ripe for reuse. Only the scroll wheel was reported to be broken.

• [...]

• [Taylor] designed and printed a simple enclosure that’s a slim 21.5 mm tall including the switch plate, and then made a dozen keycaps to match. That was until [Taylor] remembered some relegendable keycaps they had lying around — the kind that let you print your own labels and trap them underneath clear plastic. The only problem was that they are stemmed for some cylindrical actuator, so [Taylor] designed an adapter piece so they would fit on MX-style sliders. Be sure to check out the build video after the break.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• Today KDE releases a bugfix update to KDE Plasma 5, versioned 5.24.1.

• Plasma 5.24 was released in February 2022 with many feature refinements and new modules to complete the desktop experience.

• This release adds a week’s worth of new translations and fixes from KDE’s contributors. The bugfixes are typically small but important and include…

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• Neil McGovern announces his departure from the helm of the GNOME Foundation.

Distributions

• MX Linux and Ubuntu are two of the most sought-after open-source desktop operating systems in use today. Their unending use, ease of access, and availability make both distros a must-have for Linux users.

• These two distros are aptly favored, as they both continue to offer a series of unique features to the end-users. Nonetheless, it is an apparent battle, and there can only be one winner.

• Here’s a detailed comparison between MX Linux and Ubuntu.

New Releases

• The first Kali Linux release of 2022 is here.

• Kali Linux made numerous improvements in 2021 with its Linux Kernel upgrade, new hacking tools, live VM support (Kali Linux 2021.3), Apple M1 support, and more.

• Let us look at the key highlights in the Kali Linux 2022.1 release.

• [...]

• If you were using Kali Linux on a VM with an i3 desktop environment, some guest features were disabled by default.

• Now, those features like drag ‘n’ drop, copy/paste have been enabled by default giving you a better out-of-the-box experience in a VM with i3.

• Kali Linux is a Linux distribution used by ethical hackers and cybersecurity professionals to perform security audits and penetration testing against internal and remote networks. This update comes two months after the release of Kali Linux 2021.4.

• In Kali Linux 2022.1, developers have updated login backgrounds and desktop, new wallpapers and GRUB theme, and bootsplash along with a brand-new installer theme and consistent boot menu options. Browser landing pages are refreshed to conveniently allow users to access Kali Linux on Firefox and Chromium homepages.

• These features will improve the experience for ethical hackers. ARM users can rejoice as Kali Linux has Bluetooth support for Raspberry Pi devices now with documentation for the latest model RaspberryPi Zero 2W. It also supports the Feroxbuster and Ghidra tools.

• Kali Linux 2022.1 is packed with new themes as well as enhancements to existing features, such as improved usability for visually impaired users.

• Kali Linux is a widely used operating system created for Security professionals and Linux enthusiasts. It is a Debian-based distribution developed, funded, and maintained by Offensive Security.

• Kali users worldwide have so much to celebrate. The distro ended last year with the release of v2021.4. Its maker Offensive Security has now announced a new version, Kali Linux 2022.1, as the first release this year.

• The Debian-derived Kali Linux is a distro used primarily for digital forensics and penetration testing and comes with wide range of tools to help in investigations and incident responses.

• Users of the distribution will be pleased to know that its developer, Offensive Security, has just pushed out the first new release of 2022, and this brings with it various visual updates and tweaks to existing features.

• The latest version of AV Linux MX is now available for download. AV Linux MX-21 Edition code-named “Consciousness” has been released based on MX-21 ‘Wildflower’ and Debian 11. AV Linux MX-21 is based on Linux kernel 5.15 LTS.

• The KDE-focused desktop platform KaOS Linux has got a new update. Just over a month after the last release, KaOS 2022.02 has emerged with the latest KDE Plasma.

• KaOS is described as being a tightly integrated rolling and transparent distribution for the modern desktop that focuses only on KDE Plasma.

• The distro was influenced by Arch Linux, uses Pacman as its package manager, but does not rely on software repositories developed and maintained by Arch. Instead, it labels itself as a built-from-scratch Linux distro since all packages in each of its repositories are compiled by the project for the distro.

• Yesterday, KaOS 2022.02 finally becomes available as an incremental update to the previous release, so let’s take a look in brief at what’s new.

IBM/Red Hat/Fedora

• When we first started building Podman, we wanted to match the Docker command-line interface (CLI), and we added features to match. We even have a page on the Podman GitHub called transfer.md that lists Docker’s commands, the completed features, and which are still in progress. Now that Podman is basically complete and matches Docker, we rarely update the page.

• Last year, we added the Podman service to Podman 3.0, which replicates Docker’s REST API. The Podman service supports any tools needed to communicate with the Docker daemon, like Docker-compose and Docker.py. The Podman service also supports its own REST API for advanced Podman features, like pods.

• In January, we published 15 posts. The site had 11,653 visits from 8,929 unique viewers. This is roughly double the historical average for both metrics. 2,131 visits came from search engines, while 2,090 came from the WordPress Android App, 719 from Twitter, and 649 from Phoronix.

• Having just spent hours debugging simple Flask application, I need to went:

• 1. tzdata package in fedora-minimal container image is broken. RPM database lists files which are not installed (actually, they were removed during base container build). It’s getting fixed.

• It’s time to mark your calendar for Red Hat Summit 2022, taking place May 10-11, 2022. Join us as thousands of customers, partners, and technology industry leaders from around the world come together for two days of innovation, education and collaboration—all accessible at no cost.

• We’re taking a hybrid approach to this year’s event: We will be hosting a global, interactive virtual experience filled with thought-provoking keynotes, powerful customer and partner stories, Red Hat experts, networking opportunities, and more. Simultaneously, we will have a small, by-invitation gathering in person in Boston for IT leaders, executives, and select Red Hat customers and partners.

Devices/Embedded

• We feel bad when we see a retrocomputer project and think, “Hey! That’s not that old.” But, usually, when we think about it, it really is. Take the Penkesu. It looks like one of the little organizer computers that were popular — ok — a long time ago.

• Inside is a Raspberry Pi Zero 2W, a 7.9 inch 400×1280 screen and a 48-key mechanical keyboard. Unsurprisingly, the case is mostly 3D printed, but it does use Gameboy Advance SP hinges.

• There are only a few components inside which is understandable since there isn’t much room. In addition to the Pi, the keys, and the screen, there is a battery, a power controller, some diodes, and an Arduino which controls the keyboard.

• This is another great example of a project that looks great but would have been hard to duplicate without 3D printing. The compact computing power available these days doesn’t hurt either.

• The Teensy then reports its readings over a serial line every five seconds to a Raspberry Pi, which collates and graphs the data. In case you are wondering what the effect of mains frequency variations might be, we once covered the story of how an entire continent lost six minutes.

• Yodeck, the digital signage company has been utilizing Raspberry Pi 4 (2 GB RAM) as their goto computer to run their signage software.

• The versatile RPi 4 is a choice for many makers, inventors, schools, and hobbyists, but does not often find its way into mainstream business ventures.

• The Raspberry Pi RP2040 specifications only list one USB 1.1 Host/Device hardware interface, but developer’s Sekigon Gonnoc decided to leverage the microcontroller’s programmable I/Os (PIO) to add an extra USB port that also works in host or device mode.

• While the C library is still supposed to be a work in progress Sekigon implemented full-speed (12 Mbps) and slow-speed (1.5Mbps) host, full-speed device, USB hub, and multi-port support. There’s even a demo with three “Pico Pico USB” keyboards acting as USB hubs and HID plus a wireless mouse to show the results.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

• Android developer Danny Lin (aka kdrag0n), known in part for his recent work on Repainter, took to Twitter over the weekend to share that he was able to achieve “full-blown virtual machines” on the Pixel 6 thanks to Android 13’s first developer preview. This includes running virtual machines with “near-native” performance of various Linux distros as well as Windows 11.

• How is this possible? It comes down to Android 13 featuring better handling of virtualization. Android 13 supports a common hypervisor in the form of KVM — a kernel-based virtual machine. The technical details of how exactly this works get very complicated, but a recent deep-dive helps make sense of it.

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• The trailer for Disney and Pixar’s new film, “Turning Red,” streaming on Disney+ March 11, ends with Mei, its 13-year-old protagonist, considering a wild idea: acceptance. Maybe I like this new me. Yes, in her case the “new me” is becoming a giant red panda when she feels a strong emotion, which is decidedly not universal. But the themes of continually reinventing yourself, finding your community of people and learning to accept and love your true colors are timeless. It might be your story. It is also Firefox’s story.

• Firefox has a soft spot for red pandas thanks to our logo, but it goes deeper than that. “Turning Red” takes place in 2002, where a teenage girl struggles between remaining her mother’s dutiful daughter and exploring her true self. In 2002, we were coming together for the first time to create what would become Firefox. We were looking at the internet and imagining what we wanted it to be, how we wanted to show up and how we could invite everyone to join us.

• Greetings Rustaceans!

• Another year has passed, and with it comes another annual Rust survey analysis! The survey was conducted in December 2021.

• We’d like to thank everyone who participated in this year’s survey, with a special shout-out to those who helped translate the survey from English into other languages.

• Without further ado, let’s dive into the analysis!

• As the Perf-Tools team, we are responsible for the Firefox Profiler. This newsletter gives an overview of the new features and improvements we’ve done in Q4 2021.

• You can find the previous newsletter here which was about the Q3 2021. With this newsletter, I will be writing about the things we’ve done in the Q4 2021. I hope you’ll enjoy the work that we’ve done this quarter.

• Here are some highlights.

Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra

• FOSDEM is a non-commercial, volunteer-organized European event centered on free and open-source software development – and one of the biggest such events of its kind. This year, it took place online again, due to the pandemic.

• Many LibreOffice community volunteers and certified developers gave talks at the conference, and now the videos are available for all to see! So if you want to learn more about LibreOffice technology, open standards and community activities, click the link below and enjoy.

Programming/Development

• The mobile application business is booming. The number of downloads, time, and money spent shows the most considerable numbers ever. To be exact, 230 billion downloads, 3.8 trillion hours, and $170 billion spent. When more people spend more time and money, the time to market becomes a critical factor for application developers and publishers. There is also more competition which grants a huge advantage to first movers.

• Please, submit your project ideas as issues in our gitlab repository by March 1st. Make sure you answer all the questions in the issue template (Project-Proposal template).

• The GNOME Foundation recognizes that mentoring is a time consuming effort, and for this reason, we will be giving accepted mentors an option to receive the $500 USD stipend that Google pays the organization for each contributor. Mentors can choose to revert the fund into a donation to the GNOME Foundation. Some payment restrictions may apply (please contact us for questions).

• 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.

Python

• Imagine yourself walking into a grocery store for a specific item. However, to your surprise, there is absolutely no organization within the entire store—no way to distinguish between products; no way to tell what product is for what purpose; simply no way to find your item.

• You go to the counter and ask the grocer where the specific product is, but all he tells you is to “search for it.”

• Now, what do you do? The only option left for you is to find the item you so desperately want on your own by searching every product in the store.

• This grocery store is your computer, your Python package bin. All those disorganized products lying on the shelf are the endless torrent of packages you have installed over the years for your random projects.

• The next time you start a project or install some software, you will not understand if the version is up to date, if it collides with another package or python version, or if the package exists at all. Such disorganization can cause setbacks, and that not only disrupts your project but takes away the valuable moment that otherwise could have been used for something more productive.

• So what is the solution? Python Virtual Environment.

• Python Virtual Environments (virtualenvs) helps decouple and isolate versions of Python and their related pip versions. This authorizes end-users to install and manage their own set of software that is independent of those provided by the system.

• One of the primary advantages of using Python is its active developer community and availability of many software packages on pypi.org.

Java

• Java Operator SDK, or JOSDK, is an open source project that aims to simplify the task of creating Kubernetes Operators using Java. The project was started by Container Solutions, and Red Hat is now a major contributor.

• In this article, you will get a brief overview of what Operators are and why it could be interesting to create them in Java. A future article will show you how to create a simple Operator using JOSDK.

• As you can guess, this series of articles is principally targeted at Java developers interested in writing Operators in Java. You don’t have to be an expert in Operators, Kubernetes, or Quarkus. However, a basic understanding of all these topics will help. To learn more, I recommend reading Red Hat Developer’s Kubernetes Operators 101 series.

Leftovers

Science

• Though some of us are heavily assisted by smart phone apps and delivery, humans don’t need GPS to find food. We know where the fridge is. The grocery store. The drive-thru. And we don’t really need a map to find shelter, in the sense that shelter is easily identifiable in a storm. You might say that our most important navigation skills are innate, at least when we’re within our normal environment. Drop us in another city and we can probably still identify viable overhangs, cafes, and food stalls.

• The question is, do these navigational skills vary by species or environment? Or are the tools necessary to forage for food, meet mates, and seek shelter more universal? To test the waters of this question, Israeli researchers built a robot car and taught six fish to navigate successfully toward a target with a food reward. This experiment is one of domain transfer methodology, which is the exploration of whether a species can perform tasks outside its natural environment. Think of all the preparation that went into Vostok and Project Mercury.

Hardware

• Although powerful design software and cheap manufacturing services have made rolling your own PCBs easier than ever, there are some situations where a piece of FR-4 just doesn’t cut it: think art projects with hidden LEDs or biomedical applications that need to attach to the human body. For such occasions, [Narjes Pourjafarian] and her team at Saarland University in Germany developed Print-a-Sketch: a handheld device that lets you print electric circuits on almost any surface using conductive ink.

• The heart of the device is a piezoelectric print head, as used in some types of inkjet printer. It dispenses tiny droplets of silver nanoparticle ink, which is conductive enough to make useful electronic circuits by simply printing a schematic. Lines can be drawn to connect components, while customized footprints can hold LEDs, capacitors or even integrated circuits.

• Everything is instant. As soon as I lift my finger off the mouse it is loaded. 256GB of ECC RAM. I do not care what game I want, when I release my finger instant. I am not talking 8 channel ram yet.

• From PlayStations to Porsches, many consumer products have been hit by a chip shortage that began choking the global economy in 2020 and continues today. “We aren’t even close to being out of the woods,” U.S. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo tweeted last month. “The semiconductor supply chain is very fragile, and it’s going to remain that way until we can increase chip production.” Congress is poised to fund a US $52 billion silicon incentive package, as part of the America COMPETES Act, aiming to increase U.S. semiconductor manufacturing, while the European Union last week outlined their own €43 billion chip-shortage-ameliorating package.

• Many consumer products, including cars, computers, and smart devices of all sorts, have been affected by a global chip shortage that began in 2020, due in part to pandemic-related disruptions in the global supply chain.

• “The components in a semiconductor can travel well over 50,000 kilometers and cross more than 70 international borders before a chip finally reaches its end customer,” writes Mark Harris, citing a report from the Global Semiconductor Alliance.

Integrity/Availability

Proprietary

Security

• Security updates have been issued by Debian (h2database), Fedora (dotnet-build-reference-packages, dotnet3.1, and firefox), Oracle (.NET 5.0, firefox, kernel, and kernel-container), Red Hat (firefox), Scientific Linux (firefox), SUSE (unbound), and Ubuntu (firefox).

• The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the United States Secret Service (USSS) have released a joint Cybersecurity Advisory (CSA) identifying indicators of compromise associated with BlackByte ransomware. BlackByte is a Ransomware-as-a-Service group that encrypts files on compromised Windows host systems, including physical and virtual servers.

• Google has released Chrome version 98.0.4758.102 for Windows, Mac, and Linux. This version addresses vulnerabilities that an attacker could exploit to take control of an affected system. One of these vulnerabilities has been detected in exploits in the wild.

• Technology giant Google is offering bigger cash awards for hackers reporting critical security flaws affecting the Linux Kernel, GKE, Kubernetes, and kCTF.

• In November last year, Google tripled the bug bounty rewards for Linux kernel flaws reported through its Vulnerability Rewards Program (VRP), for payouts of up to $50,337 for zero-day issues.

• This week, the company announced it is nearly doubling that amount and offering a maximum reward of $91,337 for exploits that meet certain criteria. The maximum payout includes a base reward and three bonuses.

• The base reward for the first exploit submitted for a certain vulnerability is $31,337, with no reward being offered for duplicate exploits.

Privacy/Surveillance

• It’s safe to join Zoom meetings again on Macs – but that depends on how comfortable you are with Zoom after it claimed to fix a bug that kept recording after a meeting was over. The company has said for the second time that it has fixed it. Can you trust it?

• During the second wave of the pandemic in May 2021, social activist SQ Masood was riding his motor scooter back home with his father-in-law in tow. But as he navigated his silver-colored two-wheeler through the narrow lanes of Shahran, a Muslim-dominant neighborhood in the southern Indian city of Hyderabad, he said he was pulled over by two police officers.

• Masood and his father-in-law got off the motorbike thinking they would be asked to show his driver’s license or the vehicle registration card.

• But they were in for something unexpected: The police officers asked both to remove their masks so that they could take mugshots of their faces using a handheld tablet—ultimately setting the stage for an ongoing legal fight over the future of facial recognition in the world’s largest democracy.

• Two US Senators claim that the CIA has been running an unregulated — and almost certainly illegal — mass surveillance program on Americans.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• When Lily relocated to her hometown in Myanmar’s Shan State after last year’s coup, the consultant was able to keep working thanks to cheap and reliable internet access.

• These days, Lily struggles to stay online during the workday, which often includes at least two hours of virtual meetings, due to the soaring cost across all mobile carriers.

• Following a series of orders by the ruling military council, mobile data prices have doubled in the past two months. Like most of Myanmar outside of the major cities, Lily’s area has only patchy access to fixed-line internet.

• “Rising internet prices are having a huge impact on everyday working life,” Lily, who asked to use a pseudonym to avoid state reprisals, told Al Jazeera. “Not only are internet prices soaring, but internet connections are also slowing down.”

• Remember NIXI’s two domain per person policy? The National Internet Exchange of India (NIXI) is the nodal authority for [dot]in domains in India. In December 2021, NIXI published an undated notice stating that if any entity wants to register for more than two of India’s Country Code Top Level Domain (ccTLD) – [dot]in domains, they’ll have to seek written permission from the NIXI CEO. In our RTI request on this notice, NIXI responded with an incomplete response stating that the notice was issued for “national security”. Go figure.

• [...]

• NIXI is a government not-for-profit organization, established in 2003 under section 8 of the Companies Act 2013. One of its key tasks is to set up domestic Network Operation Centers (NOCs) among Indian Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to enable routing domestic interest traffic within the country instead of re-routing via NOCs abroad. It results in reduced-bandwidth charges for the ISPs and also provides better quality of service due to reduced latency.

• NIXI has been authorized as the .IN Registry by the Government of India, since January 2005. The .IN domain names are available to anyone on a first-come-first-served basis. However, in an undated notice published on its website in December 2021, NIXI said that in case an individual registrant submits a request for registering more than two ccTLDs or if a registered accredited company requests for more than a hundred ccTLDs, then a written approval of the CEO, NIXI is required.

• [...]

• The reasons to mandate written approval of CEO, NIXI has not been stated in the original notice published on its website. Further, in response to our RTI request, the PIO has merely stated that [the] “above decision is taken with respect to National Security.” Repeating “national security” as a mantra to defeat transparency, even when not probably emerging from the topic of policy formation, is a growing tendency in decision making.

• Further, the PIO has declined our request for access to documentation of the meetings in which such a decision was taken. There is also a lack of clarity on the grounds on which the approval request may be granted or denied. The notice merely mentions that “approval of CEO, NIXI will be provided within 24 hours of submission of the request irrespective of weekly off/ holiday.”

• In absence of a written procedure developed without consultation with stakeholders in a non-transparent way indicates public disinterest on part of NIXI. Further, attempts to thwart information sought through right to information requests harms the spirit of the RTI Act, 2005. We have filed a first appeal against the response received to seek clarifications and to further transparency in public interests.

Monopolies

Copyrights

• Those who deign to class pigeons as “rats of the sky” have clearly never seen a Pigmy Pouter. Nor, for that matter, a silver Jacobin, named because its ornate headdress (composed of a “hood”, “mane”, and “chain”) resembles the cowl worn by a sect of Dominican monks. Another breed of pigeons are actual nuns, cousins in kind to horsemen, barbs, dragoons, finnikins, and runts. As fanciful as their titles, the diverse appearance of these birds makes one wonder how they can all be classed as pigeon. The bug-eyed Budapest tumbler barely resembles the peacock-like fantail, the cropper, which can balloon its breast to softball proportions, or, indeed, the bizarre frillback, which, at first glance, appears tangled in a mass of perm-treated hair. In the mid-nineteenth century, as Charles Darwin was substantiating his theories of artificial and natural selection, the pigeon served as a proving ground. “Among all the domesticated animals, the pigeons were the most divergent and yet the most clearly related to a single ancestor”, writes James A. Secord. Poised on “a classificatory edge”, they became a “perfect case study in the power of selection”.

• Citing Darwin by name in his reference book, Illustriertes Prachtwerk sämtlicher Taubenrassen, Emil Schachtzabel came of age in the paradigm-molting wake of On the Origin of Species (1859), a work in which pigeons play a significant role. A government administrator by day, Schachtzabel’s passion for the bird led to an appointment as president of the Federation of German Poultry Breeders (Bund Deutscher Rassegeflügelzüchter). Yet he remains best known, perhaps, for his Prachtwerk. The lithographs from this work collected below, based on watercolor templates by Anton Schöner, illustrate the seemingly limitless boundaries of domesticated pigeons, as several birds intrude beyond their frames into the margins of the page. Pigeon cultivation weds artistry, Schachtzabel explains, with the manipulated mechanisms of evolution. Describing how marvelous combinations of feathers, shading, and color have emerged through the efforts of the pigeon’s protector — “the thinking man” (den denkenden Menschen) — he ponders what features might appear in future breeds, hoping his book will serve as inspiration.

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