● 02.24.22

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 25/2/2022: GIMP 2.99.10, NetworkManager 1.36, and MythTV 32.0

Posted in News Roundup at 8:30 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxDistributionsDevices/EmbeddedFree Software/Open SourceLeftovers

GNU/Linux

Audiocasts/Shows

• In this video, I am going to show an overview of MassOS GNU/Linux 2022.02.2 and some of the applications pre-installed.

• Here’s all the news that’s happened around the Steam Deck in the last week or so. It launches tomorrow. Are you excited? Gaming will forever change tomorrow with the launch of the Steam Deck.

• Joels gets his slack on proper

• Certifying an OS Unix compliant, 2021 FreeBSD Foundation Impact Report, Netflix, Disney, and other widevine content on FreeBSD, file hashes updated for NetBSD 8.1, Playing with CD-RWs on FreeBSD, Why “process substitution” is a late feature in Unix shells, and more.

• The Linux secret behind the new TrueNAS release, Intel acquires a major Kernel contributor and our thoughts on Podman 4.0.

• Plus why the Simula One VR Linux computer could be worth a serious look.

Kernel Space

• Linux kernel developer Matthew Wilcox has proposed removing ReiserFS from the Linux kernel – a relatively rare step.

• This isn’t due to a problem or bug in ReiserFS: it still works fine and has plenty of features. The problem was that ReiserFS code in the kernel used some API calls that nothing else did, preventing them from being changed or enhanced. For now, one of the other ReiserFS developers has contributed a patch that removes the issue.

• ReiserFS has been stuck on version 3 for some fifteen years, and although there are proposals for Reiser4 and even Reiser5, development is not moving forward because its chief architect is still in prison for murdering his wife.

• Partly due to this lack of advancement, ReiserFS is no longer widely used. One of its main proponents, SUSE, switched to ext3, leading to debates about its future as long ago as 2008. Now, SUSE kernel developer Jan Kara is not opposing Wilcox’s idea, just proposing a slower route.

• Intel announced a move on Wednesday that will inject fresh energy into a Linux kernel project that started close to two decades ago – and was lacking funding and contributors.

• The microprocessor giant has made an under-the-radar acquisition of Linutronix, a German developer house that provides services for Linux-powered industrial systems. Intel didn’t disclose the amount it paid for Linutronix, which is also an expert in real-time Linux applications. The acquisition comes as real-time industrial applications are set to make increasing use of low-latency communication between controllers, sensors, robots and tooling, and other equipment.

• Most interestingly, Linutronix is described by Intel as the architect of the PREEMPT_RT patch set, which when applied and enabled makes the Linux kernel as preemptible as possible. This in turn lowers internal latencies, which is very useful for those scheduling time-sensitive software threads to complete within a given deadline (using the deadline scheduler). This in turn is useful for ensuring, for example, incoming data is processed reliably within a tight time-frame.

• So far, PREEMPT_RT has lacked sufficient contributors and funding for mainline kernel integration and maintenance. Though folks have been building products that use the preemption patch, they did not contribute enough funding or feedback, and as a result development slowed. Linutronix has previously noted only a handful of people maintaining PREEMPT_RT.

Applications

• Coming a little over a month after NetworkManager 1.34, the NetworkManager 1.36 release is here with new features and numerous improvements, starting with improved support for WPA3 Wi-Fi network security by enabling a new H2E (hash to element) method for generating the SAE (Simultaneous Authentication of Equals) password element.

• New features include support for 5G NR (New Radio) modems, support for the IWD (iNet wireless daemon) backend for Wi-Fi P2P in addition to wpa_supplicant. Users will be able to select the default Wi-Fi backend, wpa_supplicant or IWD, during build time.

Instructionals/Technical

• Liqourix Kernel is a free, open-source general-purpose Linux Kernel alternative to the stock kernel with Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. It features custom settings and new features and is built to provide a responsive and smooth desktop experience, especially for new hardware. Liquorix Kernel is popular amongst Linux Gaming, streaming, and ultra-low latency requirements and often boasts the latest Linux Kernels, having multiple branches to choose from the stable, edge, and development.

• With the release of modern graphics cards, it’s easy to forget that before they were standard in most gaming laptops and consoles – there was Mesa. The open-source software implementation translates API specifications into vendor-specific drivers so you can use high-end applications with your PC even if it has older hardware!

• Most Linux distributions feature Mesa drivers, given they are free and open-source before any proprietary drivers options, however for most Linux distributions that focus on stability first, you may find your Mesa drivers needing an update when new releases support newer graphic card hardware and technologies.

• If you are using Linux and Windows on your PC or laptop om dual-booting mode then sometimes you might need to have access to the Linux files from Windows. Accessing Windows files or drive from Linux is easy as Linux has inbuilt support for it. For Windows users, there is various software available for it. Thanks to Windows Insiders preview build 20211, You will find a new feature: wsl –mountthat lets you attach a physical disk and mount inside WSL 2, and also enables you to access filesystems that aren’t natively supported by Windows (such as ext4).

• In this article, we are going to learn about how to add Node Group/Worker nodes into the Amazon EKS Cluster. Before getting into this guide, refer to the below guide to learn about how to create Kubernetes Cluster (Amazon EKS) in AWS cloud.

• The first and foremost question might be pops-up in your mind after seeing the title, what are actually randomized MAC addresses on Android? Well, it’s all about your privacy. Google developers made it possible for your Android to keep your information safe and secure. However, the feature started with Android 8 till now. The randomization of MAC addresses is network-based nowadays. Le’s make things more clear.

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Zulip Chat Server on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Zulip is a free and open-source chat application used for sharing private and public messages. It provides threaded conversations efficiently and handles thousands of concurrent chat sessions and is one of the fastest-growing open-source chat servers today.

• 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 Zulip Chat Server 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.

• No matter how careful you are about file management, you’ll eventually find yourself wondering where a particular document is. This is true on Mac, Windows, and even Linux.

• How do you search for a file in Linux? As it turns out, the operating system has some very powerful built-in tools for making file searches. Here’s what you need to know.

• Xrdp is an open-source remote desktop protocol server that provides a graphical user interface to remote machines using RDP (Microsoft Remote Desktop Protocol). xrdp works perfectly with the RDP clients: like desktop, Microsoft remote desktop client, NeutrinoRDP and FreeRDP. RDP transport is encrypted using TLS by default.

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Teampass Password Manager on AlmaLinux 8. For those of you who didn’t know, Teampass is an open-source password manager that helps you to store and manage all your passwords from the central location. It offers a large set of features that allows you to manage all your passwords in an organized way. You can define access rights on users to allow them to access only a given set of data. Teampass uses MariaDB as a database backend to store the password securely.

• 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 Teampass Password Manager on AlmaLinux 8. You can follow the same instructions for Fedora, RHEL, CentOS, and Rocky Linux distributions.

• RPM Packages are native to RedHat-based Linux, however not for Debian-based. Hence, in this tutorial, we learn the steps to convert the RPM package or Deb package and install it on Ubuntu 22.04 or 20.04 LTS Linux.

• Ubuntu Linux is popular because its official repositories offer thousands of packages to directly install on the system. Even to make things easy this Linux developer offers GUI software Center. Well, on one the installation of Debian packages is pretty easy on Ubuntu using the APT package manager. However, that’s not possible for RPM ones. Because they are created for RedHat-based operating systems such as CentOS, AlmaLinux, Rocky Linux, Oracle Linux, and others.

• Although, we hardly require any RPM package to install on Ubuntu because most of the time software available in RPM format will also have Deb binary. Nevertheless, in some situations, we do need RPM to DEB conversion, and to perform there is an open-source tool called “Alien”.

• With more users embracing cloud computing technologies, the deployment of web applications and services on the web is continuously increasing. Such web-based applications are usually at risk of security vulnerabilities depending on firewall settings and web server technologies used to run them. While a firewall issue is easy to fix, the same cannot be said about a compromised web server.

• This article guide recognizes Hiawatha as a reputable web server and will therefore walk us through its installation and configuration on Ubuntu 20.04 and later.

• This article recognizes Hiawatha as a reputable web server and will therefore walk us through its installation and configuration on Ubuntu 20.04 and later.

• Learn the steps to install Arduino IDE on Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy JellyFish or 20.04 Focal Fossa to write your programming code.

• The Arduino IDE is a convenient development environment for the Arduino, a circuit board with a microcontroller, i.e. a kind of mini PC. This IDE – Integrated development environment includes a text editor for writing code, a message area, a text console, a toolbar with buttons for common functions, and a set of menus. We can connect connects to the Arduino board with it to upload and communicate with programs.

• Pexpect is a Python module that allows you to spawn child applications, manage them as well as acknowledge expected patterns in their output. In addition, it is used for automating interactive applications such as ftp, ssh, passwd just to mention a few. You can also use it to automate Linux commands, setup scripts, and Software testing.

• In this guide, we will demonstrate the installation of the Python-Pexpect python module in Linux.

• This tutorial will be helpful for beginners to download and install Signal 5.33.0 on Ubuntu 22.04, Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, Linux Mint 20.3, Fedora 35, Manjaro Linux, AlmaLinux 8, and Rocky Linux 8.

• Signal is a free, cross-platform application for communication purposes, it’s main aim is to protect users’ PRIVACY and is one of the best alternatives to Whatsapp messenger.

• With Signal messenger you can do HD Voice / Video calls, Chat, etc.

• SaltStack is a free, open-source, and Python-based automation and configuration management software. It is a command-line tool that helps you to manage your infrastructure from a central location. SoltStack is made from four components.

• In this tutorial we are going to learn how to install DokuWiki on Ubuntu 20.04.

• DokuWiki is easy to use and simple open-source wiki software it that doesn’t require a database. Something that doesn’t require any storage space is something incredible. Lets highlight it more.

• The reason why we need this wiki software is that, it is easy to install and use, it doesn’t require specialized system requirements such as storage space, RAM, it has high language base support, its open-source and also device independent.

• We have other alternatives apart from DokuWiki such as: confluence, clickup, notion, xwiki, bloomfire, yext, guru and many more.

• Python is a great programming language for automating system administration tasks on Linux systems. With its wide selection of different libraries, many of them can be used to improve the efficiency of various tasks. Using the examples below, you can easily run Linux system commands, work with files and directories, perform networking tasks and automate authentication processes in just a few seconds.

• Bash is a UNIX shell and command language that you’ll find on almost all Linux distros. First released in 1989 by Brian Fox, Bash has been the default shell for most Linux distros. The name “Bash” is actually an acronym for “Bourne Again Shell”, an intended pun of the Bourne shell it replaces.

• In this guide, we’ll have a quick look at bashrc and how to reload it after making any changes.

• This article leads to creating and renaming the index of relations. We have used PostgreSQL and Windows 10 to implement some elementary examples.

• PostgreSQL sequences are created to automatically insert or update values on function calls like Nextval, Setval, and currval functions. In this article, we will be discussing the Setval function present in the list of sequence functions. The Setval function is called in a sequence when we have to change the next value in the current sequence due to some conditions. The manual alteration in a sequence is done by the Setval function in PostgreSQL.

• PostgreSQL sequences are created to automatically insert or update values on function calls. The Setval function is called in a sequence when we have to change the next value in the current sequence due to some conditions. This article will discuss Setval function present in the list of sequence functions.

• You may have heard or known about SQL. Technically SQL is a language for databases that allows managing the stored information in the database using the tables by querying these tables and other related objects. Likewise, SQL, PostgreSQL also support manipulation in the databases with the help of queries. A user can easily alter data types in PostgreSQL. In this article, our main focus is to examine the concept of PostgreSQL and other relevant information related to PostgreSQL. Most importantly we will discuss how to change column type in PostgreSQL using Windows 10 with some interesting examples that will clear the concept about PostgreSQL queries.

• You might have experienced it but never paid enough attention to it.

• If you open an application in Ubuntu, the application window usually starts in the top left, not at the center.

• Is it a big deal? No, probably not.

• The purpose of this tutorial is to show how to install Timeshift on Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish and use the program to perform a backup of the system, and subsequently restore the system from that backup.

• Most Linux users love to customize their Linux system to their liking. If your system becomes unusable, all of this work put into customizing your system will be lost, because you have to reinstall Ubuntu and start over.

• Timeshift is an application that will backup your system settings and files. It does NOT backup personal files. Taking a snapshot with Timeshift will allow you to browse that snapshot any time, like you would a normal directory of files. If your system gets corrupted or goes through some undesirable change, it is easy to restore your system as it was by using Timeshift.

Games

• Roguebook, the singeplayer roguelike deckbuilder from the developer of Faeria just got a big upgrade with a new Tournament system, plus a DLC character.

• [...]

• The unique treasure of Fugoro, Merchant of Wonders, is the Magic Staff: the first attack Fugoro performs each turn generates +5 power.

• This is a bit of a surprise. Tails of Iron from Odd Bug Studio that released for Windows back in September 2021 just added official Linux support. An announcement went up on Steam today, with a short and sweet single-line mention of the new support.

• About the game: “Set in a grim land plagued by war, Tails of Iron is a hand-drawn RPG Adventure with punishingly brutal combat. As Redgi, heir to the Rat Throne, you must restore your broken Kingdom by banishing the merciless Frog Clan and their ferocious leader, Greenwart.

• Dota 2 just got a pretty huge update that not only brings in a fierce new hero with Primal Beast, but finally reworks Techies in the gameplay patch too.

• As expected we should be reaching 1000 titles playable for the Steam Deck before the end of the month. We are now at 783 titles at the time of writing, just before the official launch scheduled for the 25th of February 2022.

• The end times are nigh! There is a lot of hype for a handheld Linux gaming device from Valve, that Steam Deck you’ve been hearing about. I have to admit, after being curious but not completely on board at the announcement, I find myself being swept up in the hype train. But let me temper those expectations (I prefer to be pleasantly surprised rather than disappointed) and let you know my thoughts going into the launch this Friday, as well as catching you up on the flurry of news we’ve recently covered.

• While I wasn’t sure at first, I did try to get a reservation as soon as I could. I managed, through dumb luck, to reserve the 256 GB model within 5-10 minutes of the reservations going live. So I’ll be the first of the Boiling Steam staff to have a Deck, and fingers crossed I’m in an early shipment to get you my impressions, hacking, and review as soon as possible.

• Apart from mass hype, what can we actually expect when the Steam Deck releases tomorrow? Here’s what’s going on.

• Starting at 10 AM PST / 6PM UTC, Valve will begin sending out emails to people in the first batch of reservations. So keep an eye on your emails and Steam app notifications. Once you get it, you have 72 hours to make the full purchase otherwise it goes to the next person in the queue.

• When this happens, the embargo on all coverage also ends. Valve said they sent out a Steam Deck to “roughly 100 media outlets” (including yours truly). So expect loads of very different takes on it.

• As for the Dock, Valve aren’t yet giving out more details but they did say it won’t be as early as they hoped. It will be available sometime “in late spring”.

• Since Tesla first introduced in-car gaming with a 2019 port of Cuphead, the list of games available on its “Tesla Arcade” platform has slowly grown to include just under 20 games. Now, though, Tesla CEO Elon Musk has expressed interest in expanding that list of Tesla-compatible games to include the tens of thousands of titles available on the Steam gaming platform.

• The new Steam version of Dwarf Fortress sounds exciting, bringing in a whole new generation to the classic and they’ve finally given something of a roadmap to release. Still the same great classic game but modernised with official graphics and sound effects – hooray!

• Included in their post is a 6-point plan of work still to be done that includes various amounts of UI work with hotkeys and tooltips, the continued work on graphics, bug fixing, Steam Workshop support, Steam Achievements, supporting the different game modes and the confirmation of Linux and macOS builds too!

• For the new GOG support, Heroic is able to download games using the Galaxy API (Windows and macOS) and for Linux you can use the offline installers that developers put up. It also supports DLC, you can run native Linux downloads using the Steam Runtime (requires Steam installed of course) which can fix some dependencies errors and pick languages for games that support it.

• Paradox Interactive has released the 3.3 ‘Libra’ Update for Stellaris, as their “custodians” initiative continues with a dedicated team working on free updates. There’s a huge assortment of fixes available from game balance to AI adjustments.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• I added some KRunner web shortcuts recently to KIO (MR600, MR631), and I’d like to tell you about them since they made my life significantly easier, and they might make yours easier too if you contribute to KDE. The inclusions from MR600, namely Invent and Invent Repo, were added in KDE Frameworks 5.88, whereas the new ones from MR 631 I expect will land in 5.92.

• KRunner’s web shortcuts, or web runners, are very convenient once you get used to them. After enabling them, you can type something in the format “keyword: queryhere”, and your query will be immediately sent and the result shown in your browser. That is to say, if you open KRunner and type “dd: kde”, your browser will open and directly show the result of the search for “kde” in DuckDuckGo. This provides a faster workflow as you no longer need to open your browser, type the address of the search provider, wait for it to load and then search; you open krunner, type and search, loading the page once. Web shortcuts like this can be applied to virtually any website which provides a search query URL, and you can decide whether they’re separated by : or by spaces. I prefer spaces.

• Here is also an accelerated timelapse of the screen recording captures while making this digital painting illustration with the software Krita 5.0.2 on Kubuntu Linux. The video is 2min43 long but the original time was around 15h and it was painted on a Intuos 4 XL.

Distributions

New Releases

• The MythTV Team is pleased to announce the release of MythTV version v32.0

• This release is the first release of the new stable branch fixes/32.

IBM/Red Hat/Fedora

• The Fedora Project is participating in the upcoming round of Outreachy. We need more project ideas and mentors! The last day to propose a project or to apply as a general mentor is March 3rd, 2022.

• Being a community of diverse people from various backgrounds and different walks of life, the Fedora Project has participated as a mentoring organization for Outreachy internships for years. The Outreachy program is instrumental in providing a rich experience in working with free and open-source software. Fedora is a proud participant.

• Container technologies that are easy to maintain, extend, ship, and run are the new de facto standard for large-scale application deployments. Thanks to cluster orchestrators such as Kubernetes and Red Hat OpenShift, these runnable units are deployed to clusters to provide the desired functionality on a large scale.

• To ensure the application is shipped in a healthy state, it is often up to developers to confirm that each runnable unit behaves as expected in the environment where it will be deployed. This article introduces Amun, a tool created and used by Project Thoth to inspect containerized Python applications. Running such inspections before deployment can reveal problems up and down the stack—including incompatibilities with dependencies, the operating system, or other parts of the environment.

• Red Hat Data Grid is a distributed, cloud-based datastore offering very fast response times as an in-memory database. The latest version, Data Grid 8.3, features cross-site replication with more observability and two new types of SQL cache store for scaling applications with large datasets. This version also brings improved security, support for Helm charts, and a better command-line interface (CLI).

• This article is an overview of new features and enhancements in this latest version of Red Hat Data Grid.

• Last year, Red Hat shared our plan to evolve our global Telecommunications, Media and Entertainment (TME) organization to better suit the needs of our partners and customers. Since then, we’ve been connecting and building within our ecosystem to deliver solutions that answer our customer’s biggest needs, one of which is helping navigate the global shift in the way services are delivered across both the TME industry and society as a whole.

• Industry-leading partners and connected organizations are working together with the telco ecosystem to build on each other’s innovations in new ways, working together to accelerate the pace of industry change, with a focus on building frictionless customer journeys. For example, service providers are helping banks meet the demands of customers for real-time digital services like hyper-personalization, real-time fraud detection and next-gen connectivity – while also giving the unbanked access to financial services. From mobile banking and payments, connected vehicles, public safety monitors, private 5G and more, service providers are fundamental in providing the many technologies that are driving a completely new landscape for improved societies and global transformation.

• Digital transformation is an inevitable part of today’s uncertain and evolving marketplace. It applies the power of data science and marketing technology to shape your business around new possibilities. Digital transformation initiatives also help you better engage your customers and workforce, improving your ability to compete.

• However, leading a digital transformation initiative can be daunting. With the pandemic causing constant shifts in consumer behavior and expectations, it’s easy to make mistakes that could adversely affect your organization.

• If you’re also struggling to navigate the business benefits of digital transformation, here are a few do’s and don’ts to follow.

• Several years ago, the IBM Power open source ecosystem team developed a search engine called Open Source Power Availability Tool (OSPAT). The purpose of OSPAT was, and still is, to address a pain point that many developers, sellers, business partners, and other IBM Power users brought to the team: They didn’t know how to (or couldn’t) find open source packages built specifically for IBM Power. And so, OSPAT was created.

• In the years since we first launched OSPAT, we’ve made many enhancements to improve the user experience and to expand the search functionality and results. So, in that spirit, we are happy to announce that, by popular demand, we’ve made yet another improvement to the tool. You can now search for containerized packages!

• As 5G technologies become more prevalent in propelling radio access network (RAN) capabilities, the question remains, how can this technology be made more accessible worldwide? For the past seven years, Baicells has been working to bring high-speed internet to organizations and end-users across the world, including areas lacking internet connectivity. To continue this effort, 5G technologies need a powerful open RAN ecosystem to establish broad network interoperability and provide internet in a variety of use cases.

Debian Family

• SLAX is a modern, lightweight desktop operating system based on Debian GNU/Linux designed to run on a USB stick. It offers all software available on Debian repository and enables you in these years to run LibreOffice or Chromium Browser in just under half a GB memory, with tens of thousands software packages available for both old and modern computers, while any other OS cannot today. That’s SLAX and we will discover it on this article.

• SLAX is a portable, lightweight computer operating system from Czech Republic. It is based on Debian GNU/Linux and prior to version 9, Slackware. It is developed as a hobby project for more than ten years by one person, Tomas Matejicek, and independently funded by donation via Patreon and its computer shop.

• It appears that the diminutive Linux distribution Slax is not dead. It’s been a while, but version 11.2 has finally popped out.

• By “a while” we mean more than two years, according to the maintainer. However, it’s a welcome update, even if some of its fans might have moved on to alternatives during its hiatus.

• Slax is an impressively compact distribution and will boot from USB mass storage devices as well as traditional hard disks or CD/DVD media (the slots for which are disappearing from hardware faster than the once ubiquitous floppy).

• The distro’s homepage claims it will also run on 128MB of RAM, although a full 512MB is needed if one wants some web browser action. Chrome is, however, missing this time around (although “you can still install it with a single click or two”).

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

• Released on April 23rd, 2020, the Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa) operating system series is a long-term supported one that will receive software and security updates for a least five years, until April 2025, on the desktop.

• Canonical also provides the community with up-to-date installation media every six months incorporating newer Linux kernel and Mesa graphics stacks. The Ubuntu 20.04.4 LTS point release is here with Linux kernel 5.13 and Mesa 21.2.6 graphics stacks from Ubuntu 21.10 (Impish Indri).

• Nautilus 42 was released as part of the recent GNOME 42 beta and it’s making the jump to the Jammy Jellyfish, albeit in a version that lacks the libadwaita redressing offered in the GTK4 port.

• Ubuntu 21.10 shipped with Nautilus 41, so Ubuntu 22.04 shipping with Nautilus 42 means there’s a larger change log than usual, with an improved file conflict UI, improved file renaming UI, and support for file search based on creation time included.

• We are pleased to announce Mir 2.7

Devices/Embedded

• While Raspberry Pi Foundation provides a fixed price for their single board computers. before taxes and shipping, the street price may be different, and I’ve seen several reports on Twitter of the Raspberry Pi 4 with 4GB RAM now selling for over $100 due to the lack of supplies. The problem seems especially pronounced in Europe with some users reporting a price close to 120 Euros, instead of the usual 50 to 60 price range. Geizhals price comparison website did even show the Raspberry Pi 4 with 8GB RAM selling for up to 149.99 Euros (About $170) just last week, but prices have now gone down to just around 100 Euros, clearly a steal!

• We’re covered DIN-Rail industrial computers powered by Raspberry Pi CM4 module, but Kristech’s Pigeon RB700 automation controller may be the one with the most features so far thanks to two RS-485 ports, two Ethernet ports, CAN FD, 1-WIRE, RS-232, 12 digital inputs (8 optoisolated, 4 dry contacts), and 8 digital outputs.

• That’s for the common features present in all variants including RB700 Essense. The RB700 Standard model adds UPS, HDMI, analog I/Os, and TPM, while the RB700 Advance is further equipped with two M.2 sockets (for SSD and/or cellular modem) and two additional RS-232 ports.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• Nearly six years after its last release, FreeDOS 1.3 came out at the weekend… in case you’re feeling nostalgic for a 1980s enterprise-grade OS.

• DOS ain’t dead. Although the long history of MS-DOS officially ended with version 6.22 in 1994, there have long been multiple other DOS-compatible OSes out there. And unlike all the others, FreeDOS is open source, legal, legitimate, and free to use.

• IBM continued development on PC DOS until 2003. Big Blue still hosts downloads of the last version, PC DOS 7.1, complete with FAT32 and LBA support. Its lead developer, Vernon Brooks, has a comprehensive reference site with all you could ever need to know about DOS’s history.

• Digital Research’s DR-DOS was bought by Novell, sold off to Caldera, and ended up an important exhibit in the Department of Justice’s monopoly case against Microsoft in the 1990s, as The Reg covered in a six-part report at the time.

• Caldera released the source code to the DR DOS 7.01 kernel, but changed its mind and closed it again, so although it too is available, the legality of using it is questionable.

• pg_back is a tool that can dump all your databases to files, with the configuration of the server and roles/tablespaces definitions.

• Taskwarrior is an open-source, free to-do/ task lists manager that works from command-line as a terminal application.

• Taskwarrior first release was on 3 June 2008, by Paul Beckingham, as it gained popularity over time, it gets an active open-source developer community that keeps it up to date.

• Despite it comes in a command-line form, it is pretty easy to learn and use in daily task tracking and management.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

FSFE

• At the prominent annual conference for Free Software, FOSDEM, we exchanged opinions and chatted with people from the Free Software community. We raised awareness on wider issues that impact our movement in the Legal and Policy Devroom, co-hosted by the FSFE. Enjoy the videos from the talks and stay in touch via Matrix until the next FOSDEM.

FSF

GNU Projects

• GIMP 2.99.10 is once again a pretty massive step in our development plans toward GIMP 3.0. We redesigned some core concepts of GIMP (“linked layers”, item locks’ GUI, dynamics switch), substantially improve the new API further into releasable state, babl and GEGL gets crazy optimizations going on, macOS and Wayland get more love, all the while improving file formats… And more!

• The new development release for the next major 3.0 of the popular image editor, GIMP 2.99.10, is out last night!

• The GIMP website does not announce the release at the moment. According to the welcome dialog, the new release introduced the new ‘Layer set’ concept to replace ‘Linked layers’. It also added Microsoft Windows Cursor file format (.cur files) support, and improved support for Wayland, macOS Big Sur, as well as PSD / JPEG-XL / HEIF files.

Programming/Development

• There is an saying that “you can take the boy out of the valley, but you cannot the valley out of the boy” so for those of us who spent a decade or two in finance and on trading floors, having “some” market price information available becomes second nature. And/or sometimes it is just good fun to program this.

• A good while back Josh posted a gist on a simple-yet-robust while loop. It (very cleverly) uses his quantmod package to access the SP500 in “real-time”. (I use quotes here because at the end of retail broadband one is not at the same market action as someone co-located in a New Jersey data center. It is however not delayed: as an index, it is not immediately tradeable as a stock, etf, or derivative may be all of which are only disseminated as delayed price information, usually by ten minutes.) I quite enjoyed the gist and used it and started tinkering with it. For example, it collects data but only saves (i.e. “persists”) it after market close. If for whatever reason one needs to restart recent history is gone. In any event, I used his code and generalized it a little and published this about a year ago as function intradayMarketMonitor() in my dang package. (See this blog post announcing it.) The chart of the left shows this in action, the chart is a snapshot from a couple of days ago when the vignettes (more on them below) were written.

• A big part of the Oplà IoT Kit’s value comes from its online content. When you get the kit, one of the first tasks is to visit opla.arduino.cc, where a host of awesome resources are available.

• And now it’s expanding on its usefulness by adding four new languages to the content.

• Qt Safe Renderer 2.0 will provide a new Monitor component for improved functional safety.

• Qt Safe Renderer is our solution for the creation of user interfaces to safety critical systems. Available since 2017 the Qt Safe Renderer is used by multiple customers and certified for several different functional safety standards. With the upcoming version 2.0 we are introducing a new approach for validating the correct rendering of safety critical information – the Monitor.

• We are happy to announce the Qt Installer Framework, Online Installer, and Maintenance Tool 4.3.0 releases today.

Shell/Bash/Zsh/Ksh

• The need to perform basic arithmetic operations is common in all types of programming, including in Bash scripts. A Linux system has multiple ways to perform arithmetic operations, and it is up to the user to decide the best method for the scenario at hand.

• In this tutorial, you will learn several ways to use arithmetic operations to perform basic calculations inside of a Bash script on Linux. Check out the examples below to see how these different methods work.

• Bash scripts are, essentially, just a series of Linux commands that have been chained together in order to accomplish something. Depending on your code, there are a few different ways to execute commands inside the script.

• In this tutorial, we will go over a few ways to execute commands from within a Bash script on a Linux system.

• When getting started with a new scripting or programming language, such as Bash scripting on Linux, the first thing a user learns to create is a Hello World script.

• This serves as a basic introduction into Bash scripts, and gives you a simple idea of how a script is formatted in Bash. In this tutorial, we will take you through the steps to create your first Hello World Bash script on a Linux system.

• It does not matter which Linux distro you are running, and you do not need any previous experience to follow along with the steps below. Let’s get started!

Rust

• Version 1.59.0 of the Rust language has been released. There are a number of new features, including support for inline assembly (in unsafe blocks, naturally), the ability to use tuples and slices on the left-hand side of an assignment, const generic defaults, and more. Incremental compilation is also disabled by default in this release to work around a known bug.

• The Rust team has published a new version of Rust, 1.59.0. Rust is a programming language that is empowering everyone to build reliable and efficient software.

• The Inside Rust Blog has posted the Rust compiler team’s goals for this year in the hope of encouraging others to help.

Standards/Consortia

• At the beginning of this year I updated a hundred of media types associated with file name extensions in the file called /etc/mime.types, distributed by the media-types package. Most changes are additions originating from recent submissions to the IANA. Amon the themes that caught my attention, there are telecommunications, computer security, commerce, healthcare and industrial automation. The vast majority of the update come from western provenance. Did the rest of the World decide to move ahead without us?

Leftovers

Integrity/Availability

Proprietary

Pseudo-Open Source

Privatisation/Privateering

Linux Foundation

• IBM and Bloomberg announced on Thursday that KServe is joining the LF AI & Data Foundation as its latest incubation project. KServe provides a Kubernetes Custom Resource Definition for serving machine learning models on arbitrary frameworks and underpins several IBM products, including Watson Assistant.

Security

• Security is paramount. Security involves defence in depth. Approaching security one step at a time, with consistency and rigour, you can mitigate threats, and keep intruders at bay.

• Intruders use a variety of different techniques in an attempt to compromise a system. For example, systems can be attacked by denial of service, cracking, intrusion, snooping (intercepting the data of another user), or viruses/worms/Trojan horses. To have a secure box, a system therefore needs a variety of defences.

• Anti-malware is a computer program used to prevent, detect, and remove malware. The most common types of malware include viruses, worms, trojans, ransomware, bots or botnets, adware, spyware, rootkits, fileless malware, and malvertising.

• This article focuses on the best anti-malware tools for Linux. We only include free and open source software.

• Here’s our verdict captured in a legendary LinuxLinks chart.

• Resetting a Windows machine and deleting all the data on it can be useful for businesses or before you sell a laptop, but only if it deletes all of your user information. Apparently, Microsoft’s updated data wipe tool is doing the opposite and is actually leaving data behind.

• Security updates have been issued by Debian (thunderbird), Fedora (php), openSUSE (jasper and thunderbird), Oracle (389-ds-base, kernel, openldap, and python-pillow), Red Hat (cyrus-sasl and samba), and SUSE (cyrus-sasl, firefox, jasper, kernel-rt, nodejs10, nodejs14, nodejs8, and thunderbird).

• Canonical has released a new major update for multiple versions of the Ubuntu OS as it looks to target more than a dozen high-severity vulnerabilities recently discovered in the Linux kernel.

• The new update fixes five flaws found in all supported Ubuntu releases (Impish Indri, Focal Fossa, Bionic Beaver, as well as 16.04 and 14.04). Others are affecting specific versions of the OS.

• For anyone who deals with security, penetration testing is often a necessary evil. Sometimes you cannot know what vulnerabilities lie in your systems until you intentionally try to break them. Fortunately, with the help of penetration testing, you’re not actually breaking those systems, you’re only knocking on their doors to see how possible it is to crash through.

• That’s why platforms like Kali Linux are so important. With pen-testing Linux distributions, you have all the tools you need to run nearly every known penetration test on your servers, desktops and network.

• Offensive Security recently unleashed the first iteration of Kali Linux for 2022. In this new release, dubbed simply 2022.1, you’ll find improved accessibility features, SSH compatibility for legacy protocols and more new tests to try.

• Let’s dig into Kali Linux 2022.1 and see if this Linux distribution should be your go-to penetration testing tool.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• Throughout 2021, the #KeepItOn coalition witnessed governments in Uganda, Zambia, Russia, Niger, and the Republic of the Congo hit the kill switch during elections, disconnecting millions of people from the internet — and their civic rights.

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