● 02.21.22

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 21/2/2022: Sven Guckes Remembered, Five Pgpool-II Releases

Posted in News Roundup at 7:11 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxDistributionsDevices/EmbeddedFree Software/Open SourceLeftovers

GNU/Linux

• Longtime FOSS contributor and advocate Sven Guckes has died at 55. A Twitter posting and news article (both in German) describe the Berlin-based Guckes as someone who was always ready to help users get the most out of their systems on Usenet and IRC. His home page and a Hacker News posting have more information as well. RIP. (Thanks to Martin Michlmayr.)

Desktop/Laptop

• A couple of days ago, I came across a forum post that pointed to a Web article that linked to the Windows 11 Insider preview Dev channel release notes, which mention a new requirement for Windows 11 Pro setup. Not Home edition, mind, but Pro. Internet access and Microsoft account will (or most likely will) be needed to finish the system setup. And I decided, that’s it, I had enough stupidity for one lifetime.

• This pointless cloudification of the classic PC desktop formula will never stop. It won’t stop until desktop as a service is a reality and all that nonsense. No. I’m not going to cooperate with that plan. And so I’ve now finally decided that I’m going to properly start moving my production workflows away from Windows. That won’t be an easy task. After all, I’ve been using Windows since 1992. But I have zero intention of using Windows 11, as it’s pointless in its own right, and I have even less intention of being a subscription monkey. Services yes, products never. This article is a start of a journey whereby I plan to wean myself off Windows. Let’s begin.

Audiocasts/Shows

• The popular LearnLinuxTV guide to setting up your own cloud with Nextcloud has been freshly updated for 2022! In this video, Jay will walk you through setting up an Ubuntu server for use with Nextcloud. In this tutorial, you’ll be walked through the process of installing Nextcloud, setting up a TLS cert with Let’s Encrypt, implementing online document editing, and more!

• Any project that cares at all about putting out a good product whether it’s open source or not will take it’s bug reports seriously but not all are created equal and you can do your part in improving the quality the developers have to work with.

• A Quick overview of Linux Mint 20.3 “Una”.

• Loads of discoveries including window tiling, rich text for CLI Python apps, FOSS Wordle, 3D home design, and fractals. Plus your feedback about JSON, Matrix, audio, and an old Mac.

Applications

• There are quite a few YouTube apps for Linux today. SF Tube is a new one that has an elegant user interface with easy to use download options.

• SF Tube, formerly FluTube, is a free libre and open-source app made using Google’s flutter. So far, it provides packages for Linux, Android, and Windows.

• The app provides a beautiful user interface with Home, Like, Downloads, and Settings tabs. A ‘search‘ button is available in top-right corner, allows to search in YouTube. And, the results are displayed along with download buttons.

• By clicking on download, it pop-up a dialog allows to choose download ‘Video + Audio‘, ‘Audio only‘, or ‘Video only‘ with quality options.

• Learn about the most commonly used tools to monitor and troubleshoot networks in Linux.

• A network administrator’s routine responsibilities like management, monitoring, configuration, and troubleshooting don’t require you to learn complicated third-party tools. Instead, you can perform all these tasks with readily available tools that come pre-installed with most Linux distributions.

• This article focuses on the network troubleshooting part of a network administrator’s responsibilities and covers tools that resolve these issues under different categories. It further covers how these utilities help in practical scenarios.

• Coming just a week after the launch of OBS Studio 27.2, the OBS Studio 27.2.1 point release is here to address a few issues reported by users from the previous release, as well as to improve some of the existing functionality in an attempt to make the software more stable and reliable during recordings and streaming.

• Specific to Linux users, the OBS Studio 27.2.1 release improves camera support by addressing an issue where some cameras wouldn’t decode correctly on GNU/Linux systems and plugs a memory leak in the new PipeWire capture feature.

Instructionals/Technical

• Learn the steps to install KDE (Kwrite) Kate Text Editor on Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy JellyFish or Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Focal Fossa using the command terminal.

• Kate is the default editor of KDE. The program’s name is an acronym and stands for KDE Advanced Text Editor. Kate is not only a simple text editor but is also suitable for programming. Syntax highlighting, code folding, configurable line indentation, and simple auto-completion are supported for numerous programming languages ​​such as Python, PHP, Java, Perl, C or C++, and for markup languages ​​such as HTML or CSS. In cooperation with Archive/Jovie, Kate can also output texts acoustically. Additional features can be integrated into Kate via extensions, such as a file system browser and source code translation.

• As an alternative to Kate, there is the slimmed-down version KWrite, which is particularly suitable for older systems and beginners. KWrite is based on Kate’s text editor component (KatePart), but cannot handle multiple files at the same time ( Tabbed Document Interface ), and does not support extensions either.

• Today we are looking at how to install Utau 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.

• I have spent the last week or so trying to clean up some of my GitLab projects, including my ‘shell-color-scripts’ program. If you’re not familiar with ‘shell-color-scripts’, it is the program that gives me a random color script every time I open a terminal.

• Ubuntu Kylin is the official Chinese version of Ubuntu however supports English. It has been described as a “loose continuation” to its parent operating system with some differences in appearance and functionality. Still, most importantly, it’s explicitly designed for approval in mainland China, but international users are welcome to use it.

• In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install Kylin Desktop Environment on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Focal Fossa.

• Safenet eToken 5110 is a smart card based USB authenticator focuse on certificate based user cases. It supports RSA2048. In this article I’m taking a note on how I use the card with pkcs11-tool and openssl on Fedora. This is based on Using Tokens in Ubuntu with PGP with information slightly modified to fulfill my environment.

• In this article, we will see what a Terraform state is and how to manage it on an S3 Bucket. We will also see what “lock” is in Terraform and how to implement it. To implement this, we need to create an S3 Bucket and a DynamoDB Table on AWS.

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Steam on Manjaro 21. For those of you who didn’t know, Steam is a popular video game digital distribution service developed by Valve. It allows users to purchase and play thousands of games. To use Steam, users have to create an account, and they can access the same games on various computers.

• 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 Steam video game digital distribution on a Manjaro 21 (Ornara).

• Sentry is a popular error-tracking Python application that is free to install and use with the Python open-source development platform. Facing errors on the resurfacing can be alerted with the use of Sentry through SMS and email notifications. You can integrate sentry with a lot of applications such as Gitab, Bitbucket, Github,etc.

• In this tutorial, we are going to explain the installation process of Sentry on Ubuntu 20.04 with docker.

• Let’s learn the commands to install the Wireshark Sniffer tool on Debian 11 Bullseye Linux using the command terminal.

• Wireshark is a free and extremely popular network communication link analyzer and was formerly known as Ethereal. It is a so-called network sniffer or network stumbler software. The tool, also known as data logger software, offers the possibility of displaying the data traffic of an interface (usually Ethernet TCP/IP) as data packets after or during the recording. This involves a clear, simplified data analysis that can be understood by the user. In this way, there is the opportunity to view individual recorded data packets or to sort them according to specific content. Wireshark can also prepare and create clear data flow statistics. WinPcap enables the transparent recording of the respective data traffic under Microsoft Windows. But Wireshark works on almost every platform: Windows, Mac OS X, AIX, BSD, Linux, and Solaris.

• Connection security is the most important criteria when setting up a remote connection between a client and a server . SSH protocol is the best way for Ubuntu users to remotely access and manage servers.

• SSH encrypts all data sent between machines, ensuring that no sensitive data is leaked. SSH encryption protects against threats such as eavesdropping and hijacking while also providing various authentication and configuration options.

• Due to its excellent capabilities, SSH has become the standard for accessing a remote Linux server nowadays. In this tutorial, you will learn to install and configure SSH in Ubuntu. In addition, you will also learn how to connect to the SSH server and handle the SSH service in the Ubuntu system.

• lfs is a small tool similar to the df command for producing a list of file systems on Linux in a clear and beautiful tabular form.

• On Linux, you sometimes need to work with disks and/or partitions directly from the command line. Often, you want to perform actions on the filesystems, but you do so by specifying the partitions where they are stored.

• There are many tools available to find the list of currently available filesystems in Linux, the most commonly used of which is df. Unfortunately, on systems with many disks, partitions, and USB drives, it can be hard to identify the device name assigned to each of them. And this is where lfs comes on the scene.

• WonderCMS is a free, open-source, and flat-file content management system written in PHP and jQuery. It is a simple, lightweight, and fast CMS that does not require any database to create a website. It offers a rich set of features including, custom login URL, SEO friendly, WYSIWYG, flexible CSS framework, native markdown, and more.

• In this post, we will show you how to install WonderCMS with Nginx on Debian 11.

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Matomo on Debian 11. For those of you who didn’t know, Matomo (formerly Piwik) is an open-source analytics platform, an open alternative to Google Analytics.

• The cmp command in Linux/UNIX compares two files byte by byte, allowing you to determine if they are identical or not. If a difference is detected, cmp displays the location of the first mismatch on the screen,if no difference is found, cmp displays the files are identical.

• cmp shows no message and basically returns the brief assuming the files analyzed are identical. A lot of options are available for the cmp command to be paired with to display different output , these options are explained below. Also, I am going to show you the practical uses of cmp command.

• In this guide, we will show you how to install OpenRGB on Ubuntu 20.04

• OpenRGB is free and open-source software used to control RGB lighting control that does not require manufacturer software.

• One of the biggest complaints about OpenRGB is the software ecosystem surrounding it. Every manufacturer has their own app, their own brand, their own style. If you want to mix and match devices, you end up with a ton of conflicting, functionally identical apps competing for your background resources. On top of that, these apps are proprietary and Windows-only. Some even require online accounts. What if there was a way to control all of your RGB devices from a single app, on both Windows and Linux, without any nonsense? That is what OpenRGB sets out to achieve. One app to rule them all.

• Boostnote is a free and open-source is the perfect app for note-taking app for coders. It doesn’t have all of those fancy features you see in other note-taking apps like Markdown formatting and folder-based organization, but it does offer snippets! Snippets make programming easier than ever before because they give programmers access to code on-demand without having to write out each step again or search through endless google results looking at example codes.

• Another great benefit is that you can work with your Github account and collaborate with your team increasing productivity across the board.

• In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install Boost Note on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS.

• Whether we’re using a Raspberry Pi or a data center server, we need to know how our CPU and RAM are performing and, in Linux, there are a plethora of commands and applications that we can use. At the basic low level “How much RAM have I used?” to inspecting the CPU for vulnerabilities such as Spectre, there are commands at our disposal.

• We are going to look at a number of different ways to get RAM and CPU data in the terminal, before we finally look at two applications which can provide a basic level of assurance, at a glance.

Games

• What’s that? More Valve games will be able to run on the Steam Deck? You got that right. Both Left 4 Dead 2 and Team Fortress 2 popped up recently. Earlier we saw that Half-Life 2 is now verified and we know this once again thanks to SteamDB, who track basically everything Steam.

• Left 4 Dead 2 appears fully Verified for Steam Deck, so out of the box it should be a great experience overall. However, in the case of Team Fortress 2 it’s only mentioned that it’s Playable. For TF2 the issues seem to be a mix of text being too small and it doesn’t have the best gamepad support. While on one hand it shows that Valve have work to do even for their owns games, on the other it shows they’re at least honest about Deck compatibility.

• The Steam Deck is going to be out in a few days for the ones that were quick to order. What to do if you have to wait much longer, while eager for some serious handheld gaming?

• [...]

• And the other option is… well, if you don’t really go out, you can actually use pretty much any phone or tablet to play your Steam games using the Steam Link app. Since touch controls suck, and you are very likely to already have a controller (unless you are one of the 33%), you just need a controller attachment and you are good to go! It’s really cheap.

• I found that there’s a good enough solution if you have a Dual Shock 4: just buy this kind of adapter, which is basically a piece of plastic that clips itself on your DS4 and has a spring mechanism to keep your phone into place. There’s quite a few variants available on Amazon and other markets, but since they all pretty much look the same I assume they work equally well.

• Since we were asked a lot about this, we reached out to porting studio Feral Interactive to see if they had any plans to update their Linux ports for the Steam Deck.

• Feral have ported a number of titles to Linux in the past including Alien Isolation, XCOM & XCOM 2, Total War: WARHAMMER I & II, Total War: THREE KINGDOMS, HITMAN, the Tomb Raider series, Life is Strange & Before the Storm & Life is Strange 2, Dirt Rally and the list goes on. They also have a port of Total War: WARHAMMER III upcoming in “Early Spring”.

• Here’s a new strategy game I’m excited to play! TFC: The Fertile Crescent is a pixel-art take on the classic base-building RTS genre and it’s entering Early Access on March 29.

• Inspired of course by some of the greats, this title places quite the emphasis on its multiplayer and community tournaments. However, they’ve also mentioned over email in a press release there’s going to be a special “Horde Mode” that will “have its own rules with an opponent in the form of nomads”. During Early Access they also plan to add in more additional modes and there’s going to be a brand new refresh interface compared with the old free version on itch.io.

• Ready to have a busy week? Steam Next Fest: February 2022 Edition is officially live and there’s plenty of indie developers showing off their latest. Not only can you expect to see a ton of limited-time playable demos (some devs keep them up), there’s also a week full of livestreams and developer chats direct on store pages.

• It is rare for Linux to see support from both sides of an industry battle, but that is exactly where we were with the release of Quake III Arena and Unreal Tournament. With both games aiming to package the full breadth of the online multiplayer shooter experience into a standalone title, the competition between the two was fierce. I myself have always favoured the solid craftsmanship of Quake III Arena, but the greater variety in Unreal Tournament has to be admired.

• Some versions ship with a Linux installer already on the disc, but with the Game of the Year Edition you need to download the ut-install-436-goty.run setup script which grants all of the official patches. This proved a smooth process even when swapping between CD-ROMs, but the installer can be too opaque, not telling you outside of the terminal output that it is busy decompressing maps. This can take some time, making it easy to assume that the setup has stalled.

• Unreal Tournament only came alive when I set the XFree86 server to 32 bit colour depth, not just improving the visuals and clearing up the numerous Z Buffer artifacts, but also helping to level out the game performance. From there I tweaked the UnrealTournament.ini file, setting “NoDynamicLighting” to “True” and “UseGammaExtension” to “1″, with “Coronas” and “VolumetricLighting” set to “False”. Like this the game was playable and still looked better than on first launch.

• With the Steam Deck only a few days away from release, it seems people are wondering the support status of other stores. Seems GOG won’t be supporting it, which isn’t surprising.

• Currently, GOG does support Linux with direct downloads, although they only officially support a few versions of Ubuntu. They do not, however, support GOG Galaxy on Linux. This has been a bit of a problem, as some games multiplayer relies on Galaxy meaning a few Linux builds on GOG came without multiplayer.

• I’ve seen a lot of comments saying that folks intend to dual boot or just straight up install Windows on their Steam Deck. While you *can* do that, here’s why I believe dual booting Windows on the Steam Deck is a grave mistake.

• The next big free upgrade to X4: Foundations along with the X4: Tides of Avarice expansion are releasing March 14. X4 is easily one of the most in-depth space games around

• “Encountering and interacting with previously unknown, lawless pirate and scavenger factions, will challenge your perception of social order and justice in the X universe. In new sectors and dangerous regions, you will not only discover new ships and stations, but also encounter stellar phenomena that will significantly influence your plans and actions. What is it all about, and who are the mysterious manipulators that have learned to master a rare and vital resource? Your journey will lead you towards the answers. Set out and discover a new chapter of X4: Foundations.”

• One we missed from earlier this month, Pacify is a very popular survival horror and the developer has been making improvements ready for the Steam Deck. It has a Very Positive rating from 23,297 user reviews, so it must be quite something.

• Released back in 2019, the developer released an update on February 7 to include various optimizations for the Steam Deck. They say at Medium quality you can expect a smooth 60FPS while playing which sounds ideal. They also included this nice shot of it running on Deck:

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• The latest release of the KDE Plasma desktop has a pretty cool trick up its sleeve, one that might make you want to switch from your current Linux desktop of choice.

• Every time I ponder KDE Plasma, I can’t help but think about the tortoise and the hare. In my reality, GNOME is the hare and KDE is the tortoise. When GNOME Shell 3 was first released, it was as if it shot out of the gate, ready to go and make some noise. And noise it did make. And even though not all of the noise was positive, it was next to impossible to avoid. And so GNOME went. It evolved very quickly and became the default desktop for a lot of Linux distributions.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• The Gedit is the short form of Gnome Editor officially preinstalled with the Ubuntu and other most developed Debian-based Linux distributions. Many users and system admins might find other text editors like Nano or Vim most useful. Still, with a bit of tweaking and getting some plugins, you can turn your default Gedit text editor into a professional and powerful script editor. There are many plugins on the web for the Gedit editor that you might need to make the tool functional.

• The Gedit allows you to write programming code with indentation, bracket matching, and syntax highlighting. It also supports the UTF-8 codec package. If you’re thinking of trying a new text editor, you can get some plugins before getting a new fancy one.

Distributions

• Nitrux OS may not be one of the mainstream Linux distributions, but it is surely one of the unique offerings.

• We have also interviewed its creator Uri Herrera in 2019 to learn how they initially aimed to go beyond the traditional Linux distributions.

• And, since then, we’ve come a long way to its recent Nitrux 2.0 release.

• Not to forget, they also ditched Ubuntu as its base in favor of Debian, last year.

• So, considering a lot has happened, and it’s been around for a few years now. Should you give it a try?

• Here, I highlight some reasons to try Nitrux OS…

• If you’re looking for a Linux distribution for audio/video production, AV Linux MX-21 might be your best option.

• Code-named, “Consciousness,” the latest release of AV Linux has become completely rebuilt, from the ground-up, which makes it the first iteration that wasn’t a respin of a previous release. Based on Debian 11, AV Linux MX-21 was built with the same tools used to build MX Linux and antiX.

• Because this new release is a complete rebuild, there is no way to upgrade from previous releases to MX-21. In other words, you’ll have to do a fresh install to gain the benefits of AV Linux MX-21.

• What are those benefits? First off, it ships with kernel 5.15 and a brand new Mesa graphics stack. The one caveat to those two changes, AV Linux no longer supports 32-bit architecture. As far as the kernel is concerned, the version in MX-21 is the Liquorix kernel, which is a high-performance kernel geared for streaming and ultra-low latency.

IBM/Red Hat/Fedora

• Red Hat strives to make the best product decisions possible with input from the community and customers. Previously, Red Hat had announced that changes in the roadmap would deprecate Puppet functionality. Based on feedback, Red Hat has decided to accommodate the community and customers by reversing that decision.

• Red Hat Satellite 7 will ship Puppet ENC support as a plugin. That means that support for Puppet will be available only if it is explicitly enabled in new installation (upgrades to Satellite 7 will preserve existing functionality), whereas, in the past, Satellite provided Puppet support by default.

• There will be no functional change in Satellite and Puppet integration between Satellite 7 and Satellite 6.10.

• In the future, the plugin mentioned above is planned to remain an optional feature. However, Puppet Agent and Puppet Server will no longer ship with Red Hat Satellite.

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

• Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue 723 for the week of February 13 – 19, 2022.

• In regulated environments, some machines must adhere to strict cryptography requirements designed to protect systems from being cracked, altered, or tampered with. Using cryptographic modules that are FIPS certified or compliant ensure a systems’ encryption solutions adequately protect its digital assets. FIPS validated operating systems are a prerequisite for government agencies, their partners, and those wanting to conduct business with the federal government.

• The financial services sector is adopting Artificial Intelligence technologies at a growing rate. Areas such as asset management, algorithmic trading, credit underwriting, blockchain based finance solutions, fraud detection and claims processing have all seen increased adoption of Machine Learning to drive more robust data-driven decision processes and better understanding of customer needs . This shift is mainly driven by the emergence of more cost-effective computing capacity and the abundance of available data.

• [...]

• Open-source machine learning software has enabled the rapid growth and evolution of ML frameworks and libraries, and thus made it possible for financial institutions to solve increasingly complex challenges and foster a mindset of innovation, growth and community. Additionally, open-source ML platforms will help accelerate AI adoption within the financial services sector, which in turn makes AI better and smarter, benefiting everyone.

• Data scientists at financial institutions are always looking for ways to deploy, scale, distribute ML models across clusters of servers and optimise models using techniques like GPU offloading.

Devices/Embedded

• VIA announced a “VIA SOM-9X35 Starter Kit” that runs Linux or Android on an NPU-equipped, 2GHz, quad -A53 MediaTek i350 via a VIA SOM-9X35 module with 2GB LPDDR4 and 16GB eMMC. The kit includes a 7-inch touchscreen and 13MP camera.

• VIA Technologies has introduced a VIA SOM-9X35 compute module, which is available with a carrier board in a combo product called the VIA VAB-935 3.5 SBC. There is also a VIA SOM-9X35 Starter Kit that adds a touchscreen, camera, speakers, a microphone, and more.

• The VIA SOM-9X35 is built around MediaTek’s 14nm i350 SoC, a higher end version of the similarly quad-core, Cortex-A53 based MediaTek i300 that boosts the clock rate to up to 2.0GHz and adds a HiFi4 DSP and 500MHz MediaTek APU 1.0 AI Processor. MediaTek also swaps out the Imagination PowerVR Series8XE GE8300 GPU for an up to 800MHz Arm Mali-G52 MC1. As before, there is a 13MP-ready ISP and [email protected] video decoding.

Open Hardware/Modding

• [Zhihui Jun] is a name you’re going to want to remember because this Chinese maker has created quite probably one of the most complete open-source robot arms (video in Chinese with subtitles, embedded below) we’ve ever seen. This project has to be seen to be believed. Every aspect of the design from concept, mechanical CAD, electronics design and software covering embedded, 3D GUI, and so on, is the work of one maker, in just their spare time! Sound like we’re talking it up too much? Just watch the video and try to keep up!

• After an initial review of toy robots versus more industrial units, it was quickly decided that servos weren’t going to cut it – too little torque and lacking in precision. BLDC motors offer great precision and torque when paired with a good controller, but they are tricky to make small enough, so an off-the-shelf compact harmonic drive was selected and paired with a stepper motor to get the required performance. This was multiplied by six and dropped into some slick CNC machined aluminum parts to complete the mechanics. A custom closed-loop stepper controller mounts directly to the rear of each motor. That’s really nice too.

• [...]

• There is a brief mention that the controller runs the LiteOS kernel for Harmony OS, but no details we can find. The project GitHub has many of the gory details to pore over perhaps a bit light in places but the promise is made to expand that. For remote control, there’s a BLE-connected teaching device (called ‘Peak’) with a touch screen, again details pending.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

• Huawei has started testing a number of new features for existing HarmonyOS 2.0 powered devices, so the company has already begun testing HarmonyOS 3.0 software ahead of the public rollout? Let’s find out.

• The answer is no, Huawei has not started testing HarmonyOS 3.0.

• As recently, Huawei began to recruit new smartphone users to test run the latest HarmonyOS 2.0 features. Still, the recruitment is on and selected models can participate in the entire test program including Huawei Mate 40 Pro, Mate X2, Mate 30 Pro, and more.

• There are slots distributed for these testing models and only a limited number of users can participate in the activity. Following approval, selected applicants will receive the HarmonyOS new features software beta update.

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• There are a handful of cloud services available for Linux users that provide native applications.

• Dropbox is one of the oldest and most popular. Then there is Mega and pCloud. Google has shamelessly decided not to create a Google Drive client for Linux.

• You may also self-host Nextcloud or Seafile, but that’s not everyone’s cup of tea.

• Recently, I was approached by another cloud storage provider called Internxt. I asked if they provide a desktop application for Linux users, and the answer was yes. I also found that they are open source on both the server and client-side.

• Only packages that were generated by the RBE or retrieved from the Official Git Repository are displayed in the following table.

• They are separated into groups based on their category (Base, Device Drivers, etc.).

• The first column (Retrieved from Repository) lists the package ID. It is immediately followed with some basic information on the package. This includes the approximate compressed size of the package and if it is part of either the BASE or FULL package set.

• The additional columns denote the presence of the package on that specific media. They are color coded for the type of install.

• We’re wrapping up another great week with the following activities from the Apache community…

SaaS/Back End/Databases

• Pgpool Global Development Group is pleased to announce the availability of following versions of Pgpool-II:

• 4.3.1 4.2.8 4.1.11 4.0.18 3.7.23

Content Management Systems (CMS)

• In this twenty-fifth episode of the WordPress Briefing, Executive Director, Josepha Haden Chomphosy discusses future-proofing the WordPress project with the Five for the Future pledge.

FSF

Licensing/Legal

• Why Did Mastodon Threaten to Sue Truth Social?

• Truth Social is based on Mastodon, and that’s perfectly acceptable. Mastodon’s open-source license allows developers to use, modify, and distribute their software as they see fit. However, those who use that license—GNU Affero General Public License v3.0 (AGPL-3.0)—must disclose that their project is based on Mastodon. They must also make the code, and any modifications publicly available for anyone to download.

• The initial Truth Social website did not mention its connection to Mastodon or make any of the source code available. In fact, the platform claimed that its source code was proprietary and owned by the company. Viewing this as potential copyright infringement, Mastodon threatened to sue if Trump did not comply in 30 days.

• To avoid that lawsuit, Truth Social acknowledged it is based on Mastodon. Now, if you head to the Truth Social website, you can click Legal Docs at the bottom of the page and select Open Source to download a ZIP file containing Mastodon’s source code.

Programming/Development

• We have an exciting announcement to make! The rust-analyzer project, a new implementation of the Language Server Protocol (LSP) for Rust, is now officially a part of the wider Rust organization! :tada:

• We want to start by thanking everyone who has gotten us this far, from contributors, to sponsors, to all the users of rust-analyzer in the Rust community. We could not have done this without you.

• The immediate impact of this organizational change is limited — nothing changes for rust-analyzer users or contributors. However, this change unblocks technical work to make rust-analyzer the officially recommended language server for Rust in the near future.

• If you were hesitant to try rust-analyzer before, today is a good opportunity to do so. Not only is it a very capable language server for Rust, but according to VS Code statistics, it is one of the best rated LSP implementations across programming languages. We highly recommend giving rust-analyzer a spin today, even if it will take some more time for us to complete the due process and switch from the existing officially recommended LSP implementation (RLS) properly.

• The core team is currently looking at restructuring the project’s leadership to provide more pathways for community members to become actively involved in the project’s stewardship. Swift has gradually introduced more workgroups to focus on technical and non-technical investments (an idea that has been successful in other language and OSS projects). We are looking to push that idea further. In the coming weeks, we hope to introduce a new language workgroup that will focus on the core of the language evolution itself, splitting off this responsibility from the core steering of the project. The intent is to free the core team to invest more in overall project stewardship and create a larger language workgroup that can incorporate more community members in language decisions. More details will be coming soon.

• Cloud providers make it easy to provision new infrastructure. This means it’s simple to spin up environments to test a new feature or perform a demo for a customer. Keeping your Octopus targets in sync, though, can be challenging as this infrastructure comes and goes.

• Octopus currently provides a dynamic infrastructure feature that lets you register targets during the deployment process. We give you the necessary pieces, and you glue them together to meet your requirements. This involves custom scripting, juggling output variables, and toggling settings.

• This complexity has made it an expert use case, taking many attempts to put everything in the proper order. For many users, it’s easier to register these targets manually. Because the functionality isn’t clear, some won’t even know there is another way.

• We want to change all that. We want to leverage the way users already interact with their cloud providers and Octopus, to create a solution that feels unobtrusive and intuitive.

Perl/Raku

• Daniel Sockwell took Mike Clark‘s ideas a bit further and wrote an extensive blog post with further thoughts on cooperative grammars, in which they show the use of different grammars to parse the CSS parts of an HTML file (as a proof of concept). Which in turn caused quite a discussion on /r/rakulang.

Python

• The maintainers of popular Python programming language are on the hunt for developers to build a new feature for the Python Package Index (PyPI) in the form of organization accounts.

• Python’s importance to today’s tech can’t be overstated. It has become the go-to language for machine learning, in part because of its wealth of software libraries like NumPy.

Leftovers

• When Benjamin Young was asked to consult on a film to be made entirely in his ancestral Haida tongue, he thought the project sounded almost impossibly ambitious. As head teacher and director of Haida Immersion Preschool in Hydaburg, Alaska, he knew the number of fluent Haida speakers could be counted on just two sets of hands.

Hardware

• In the world of computing, the term “processor” often refers to the central processing unit, or the CPU. The CPU is the most ubiquitous processor, but it is not the sole processing unit available to data centers. GPUs and DPUs can help manage increasingly complex processing loads and computing tasks.

• All three processing units support complex computing, but each is suited for different tasks or workloads. By using multiple types of processing units in your data center, these units can support each other and further accelerate large or complicated tasks.

• It’s a dedicated hacker who has the patience to build an engine from scratch. And it’s a borderline obsessed hacker who does it twice. [Meanwhile In the Garage] is of the second ilk, and in the video below the break, he takes a failed engine design and musters up the oomph to get it running.

• The whole build began with an idea for a different kind of intake and exhaust valve. [Meanwhile In the Garage] dreamed up a design that does away with the traditional poppet valve. Instead of valves that open by being pushed away from their seat by a camshaft, this design uses a cylinder that is scooped so that as it rotates, its ports are exposed to either the intake or the exhaust.

Integrity/Availability

Proprietary

• Put simply, a bug subsequently dubbed Y2K22 (named in the style of the Y2K bug that spooked the world starting about a quarter century ago) caused the software to be unable to handle the date format for the year 2022. Microsoft’s fix? Set the date on malware detection updates back to the fictional December 33rd, 2021…

• Recently [Big Clive], everyone’s favorite purveyor of anything electronic that’s dodgy, cheap, cheerful, decidedly crispy or any combination thereof, got sent a very dead external power supply unit. Being clearly a third-party PSU with Engrish and many (likely not truthful) safety approval markings on its label, this PSU had the dubious honor of having destroyed a Microsoft Surface computer as well as the monitor that was connected at the time.

Security

• Security updates have been issued by Debian (php7.4, redis, snapd, twisted, webkit2gtk, and wpewebkit), Fedora (cyrus-imapd, nodejs, phpMyAdmin, polkit, snapd, webkit2gtk3, and xen), Gentoo (chromium), openSUSE (jaw, kubevirt, virt-api-container,, opera, polkit, and sphinx), Red Hat (ruby:2.6), Slackware (expat), and SUSE (kubevirt, virt-api-container, virt-controller-container, virt-handler-container, virt-launcher-container, virt-libguestfs-tools-container, virt-operator-container and polkit).

• Presumably they’re using camera, printers, and stickers to swap the codes on the bikes. And presumably the victim is charged for not returning the stolen bicycle.

• Local scam artists are pedaling a new con.

• They’re stealing Citi Bikes by switching the QR scan codes on two bicycles near each other at a docking station, then waiting for an unsuspecting cyclist to try to unlock a bike with his or her smartphone app.

• The app doesn’t work for the rider but does free up the nearby Citi Bike with the switched code, where a thief is waiting, jumps on the bicycle and rides off.

• The ripped-off ride is worth only $3 by itself. But the victimized customer could be on the hook for the $1,200 bike if it ends up lost or stolen. They’re also left without a way to get around town.

• “It’s happening every day,” claims Hell’s Kitchen amateur sleuth Richard, who captured video of the con in action at the Citi Bike dock near the corner of West 43rd Street and 10th Avenue in Manhattan.

• Whether running on the public cloud or a private cloud, the use of containers is ingrained in today’s devops oriented workflows. Having workloads set up to run under the mandated compliance requirements is thus necessary to fully exploit the potential of containers. This article focuses on how to build and run containers that comply with the US and Canada government FIPS140-2 data protection standard.

• Every month we review the work funded by Freexian’s Debian LTS offering. Please find the report for January below.

• Here we go again. Another obnoxious security bug, CVE-2022-0435: A Remote Stack Overflow in The Linux Kernel was found by Appgate senior exploit developer Samuel Page while he was poking around at a Linux heap overflow security bug, CVE-2021-43267 from November 2021. Page’s discovery is a remotely and locally reachable stack overflow in the Linux kernel’s Transparent Inter-Process Communication (TIPC) protocol networking module.

• TIPC, as the name says, is used for intracluster communications. Cluster topology is managed using the concept of nodes and links between these nodes. Messages sent using TIPC can be sent over either UDP or Ethernet. So far, so good.

• Whether Linux distributions are more secure than Windows or macOS is the source of on-going debate, but Google’s Project Zero has some interesting findings relating to the patching of security holes.

• The security research program at Google has published information relating to security flaws found in software over the course of two years. Between January 2019 and December 2021 the Project Zero team found that Linux developers addresses problems far faster than Apple, Microsoft or Google itself.

Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt/Fear-mongering/Dramatisation

• Attention Linux administrators: Security researchers at Qualys have discovered multiple vulnerabilities in the snap-confine function on Linux operating systems. One of them can be exploited to escalate privileges to gain root privileges. And once an attacker has root privileges they can do pretty much anything. Snap is a software packaging and deployment system allowing software developers to distribute their applications directly to Linux systems. Administrators are urged to apply security patches from their Linux distributions as soon as possible to plug this hole.

Privacy/Surveillance

• Apple’s AirTags are meant to be a high-tech solution to an age-old problem: finding misplaced keys, wallets and other personal items. But since Apple launched the diminutive Bluetooth trackers last April, they’ve also been used for nefarious acts – particularly stalking.

• “It was the scariest, scariest moment ever, and I just want everyone to be aware that this exists,” Sports Illustrated model Brooks Nader said in a January Instagram post. She was describing an iPhone alert she received one night while walking home from a bar saying that a device had been tracking her location. Nader’s husband discovered an AirTag hidden in her coat pocket after she arrived home, she said in an interview on the Tamron Hall Show.

Environment

Wildlife/Nature

• The bald eagle, whose resurgence is considered one of the great conservation success stories of the 21st century, is facing a serious threat: lead poisoning.

• Researchers who tested the feathers, bones, livers and blood of 1,200 bald eagles and golden eagles, another bird of prey in the Northern Hemisphere, found that nearly half of them had been exposed repeatedly to lead, which can lead to death and slow population growth.

• Scientists believe that the primary source of the lead is spent ammunition from hunters who shoot animals that eagles then scavenge, usually during the winter, according to the study, which was published on Thursday in the journal Science.

• Nearly a third of the birds tested also showed signs of acute poisoning, or short-term exposure to lead, according to the study, which was led by scientists from the United States Geological Survey, Conservation Science Global, Inc. and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. The effects of lead poisoning are devastating, said Vincent A. Slabe, the lead author of the study and a research wildlife biologist for Conservation Science Global in Montana.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• An Oklahoma school that specializes in teaching advanced computer science skills has rejected an offered donation by Melania Trump, who said on Friday that “politics got in the way of my mission to support children.”

• Mrs. Trump disclosed the clash with the school in a statement defending her charitable fund-raising efforts since she left the White House, which she has said are focused on supporting foster children.

• Mrs. Trump did not name the school that she said rejected her donation, noting only that it was “a computer science school founded in Silicon Valley with a campus in Oklahoma.”

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