● 02.27.22

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 27/2/2022: Coreboot 4.16 and GNUnet 0.16.0

Posted in News Roundup at 12:00 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxDistributionsDevices/EmbeddedFree Software/Open SourceLeftovers

GNU/Linux

Desktop/Laptop

• With transistors already nearing their physical size limits, many would agree that ARM-based CPUs will supersede x86-based CPUs soon. For this reason, veteran laptop manufacturers and startup companies have begun the race to develop and produce quality ARM laptops for the new market.

• And with efficiency being an ARM-based laptop’s main advantage, pairing such an efficient CPU with an efficient operating system, such as Linux, is a dream come true for many tech enthusiasts.

• If you’re in the market for the best Linux laptop that utilizes a highly efficient SoC (System on Chip), keep reading below for a list of the best ARM Linux laptops you can buy today.

Server

• The AlmaLinux OS Foundation, the nonprofit that stewards the only community owned and governed open source CentOS alternative, today announced a new stable release with support for the PowerPC architecture and IBM Power Systems, inching closer to parity with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and CentOS.

Audiocasts/Shows

• On this episode of This Week in Linux: Steam Deck Officially Launched, Intel Acquires Linutronix, Podman 4.0, MythTV 32, PeerTube 4.1, Planner 3.0, Vulnerability Found In Ubuntu’s Snaps, Mir 2.7, GIMP 2.99.10, Libinput 1.20, NetworkManager 1.36, Slax 11.2. All that and much more on Your Weekly Source for Linux GNews!

• Every fetch application is the same or so I thought until I found this one shining light in the dark, Onefetch which is basically neofetch but for git repos instead of your system.

Applications

•  A sound system is software that manages the use of and access to audio devices (usually a sound card). It commonly runs as a background process.

• To provide an insight into the quality of software that is available, we have compiled a list of 4 high quality free and open source sound systems.

• Here’s our verdict captured in a legendary LinuxLinks chart. We only feature open source goodness.

• It is true that modern music streaming tools are quite flexible and let you enjoy just technically any song you like. But still, people like me are there who love the old fashion radio streaming functions. I called this radio streaming system an old-fashioned one because you don’t control what program is running on it. So, everything is just like a surprise here. However, if you love to enjoy a radio streaming tool on Linux, this is where you should be right now. We will here discuss one of the best radio streaming apps, Strimio.

• [...]

• Strimio is one of the most popular radio streaming apps for Linux. And it’s completely free. Furthermore, the installation process is easier too. So, why don’t you give it a try? This beautiful app requires nothing but a few minutes to spare to install. In exchange, it offers you hours of exciting radio streaming experience.

• Here, we take our leave and promise to come back with something new. So, if you are already impressed, just follow the installation process mentioned above to enjoy unlimited streaming fun with Strimio. Till then, stay tuned with Strimio. Thank you.

• The official YouTube client for android is full of ads and other tracking scripts. If you use it, then you will be forced to watch tens of intrusive ads from video to video, and your privacy will be under attack because of Google’s tracking activities.

• Luckily, you don’t have to go through all this. You can use an alternative YouTube client app for android in order to avoid this situation.

• NewPipe is an open source YouTube client for android, which also happens to be completely free of charge. It allows you to watch and browse any content on YouTube without having to use the official YouTube app from Google. In this way, you won’t see any ads and you will never be tracked by Google.

Instructionals/Technical

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Timeshift on Debian 11. For those of you who didn’t know, Timeshift is a powerful open-source tool that can help you protect your data. Timeshift protects your system by taking incremental snapshots of the file system at regular intervals. These snapshots can be restored at a later date to undo all changes to the system.

• 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 Timeshift open-source tool back up and restore file snapshots on a Debian 11 (Bullseye).

• Vim is a remarkable editor that most Linux/UNIX sysadmins have come to love and use every day.

• You might think, “I would switch to Vim immediately if Vim could show me line numbers”. Well, consider that done.

• The Cloud SQL Auth proxy works by having a local client running in the local environment. Your application communicates with the Cloud SQL Auth proxy with the standard database protocol used by your database.

• It uses a secure tunnel to communicate with its companion process running on the server. Each connection established through the Cloud SQL Auth proxy creates one connection to the Cloud SQL instance.

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Nmap on AlmaLinux 8. For those of you who didn’t know, Nmap is an open-source network scanner and security auditing utility. Nmap allows finding devices running on their network and discovering open ports and services that, if not secure or hardened, can lead to potential exploiting known vulnerabilities security risks. Nmap support is available for Linux, Windows, UNIX, FreeBSD, etc.

• 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 Nmap network scanner on an AlmaLinux 8. You can follow the same instructions for CentOS and Rocky Linux.

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install MyPaint on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, MyPaint is an easy-to-use painting program that works well with Wacom graphics tablets and other similar devices. MyPaint takes quite a little memory and has a smaller footprint on the disk. It is super fast and does a marvelous job to get bitmap images done just like MS Paint. It’s a cross-platform application available for Microsoft Windows, macOS, Linux, and Unix-like operating systems.

• 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 MyPaint simple painting tool 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.

• This article discusses an important Linux shell environment variable called PATH and how you can add a directory to this variable.

• In general, most programs you’ll ever run on your Linux system will work flawlessly, and your shell will not present any errors at the time of their execution. However, there may be times when you might want to quickly run custom scripts or programs from non-standard directories on your Linux system.

• In such cases, you need to add their source directory to your shell’s PATH variable so that it knows where to find them.

• Most web users need no introduction to Google Chrome as it is the most used Internet Browser software globally, with a recent update in 2022 that Chrome is currently the primary browser of more than 2.65 billion internet users and is why most websites’ code now target it first before any other browser.

• Chrome is designed to be sleek and clean in its looks and features and especially at loading website pages as it used to claim to be the fastest of all the browsers, but that is now a considerable debate with Edge leading the charge and many others have caught up, the browser competition has increased recently.

• The tutorial will use the yay AUR helper, ideally most users may be using some wrapper for Pacman, for new users, it is essential to install one to keep your packages up-to-date while you learn Arch/Manjaro.

• In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install Google Chrome on Manjaro 21 Linux by installing either stable, beta, unstable (nightly build), or a combination of the browsers.

• If we discuss very popular programming languages, we have to discuss Python. This programming language is present in many technologies that are part of our days. And Python is also a fundamental component of many Linux distributions. So, in this post, you will learn how to install Python on Linux Mint.

• SLAX is a portable desktop operating system designed to run on removable media like USB stick. We covered it yesterday in a short review. However, we didn’t make it clear how to make its bootable media. It’s different to Ubuntu and another standard GNU/Linux distros in the making of its bootable as we cannot use image writing utilities like Rufus or Unetbootin. For that purpose, now we share with you how to make it from start to finish.

Games

• Are you finding that ELDEN RING has some mad stuttering when loading things in the background? Valve has released an update for Proton Experimental in the bleeding-edge Beta to help.

• At the end of last year we had rounded off most of the core changes in Godot 4 to support XR, had XR fully working through OpenVR/SteamVR and except for a pesky timing issue had OpenXR up and running.

• It initially seemed the timing issue was related to issues with the original Vulkan implementation on OpenXR, OpenXR had already moved to a new approach where OpenXR takes over managing the Vulkan instance. Switching to this new approach however required embedding OpenXR support into the core of Godot. With the Meta grant securing the funding to switch to the new approach the whole implementation was ported to the core.

• While we would later discover the cause of the timing issue was fixable in the plugin the new approach is far more future proof and will make it much easier to implement various XR features including the editor features we have on the roadmap.

• The initial version of this work was merged this week, for details check the Core OpenXR PR. Currently only desktop VR is supported as we are waiting on Meta to adopt the official Khronos OpenXR loader.

Distributions

EasyOS

• EasyOS has three screen-shot apps: Take a Shot! (TAS), Screeny and the full-screen capture feature of mtPaint. These are to be found in the Graphic menu.

• Screeny is builtin to woofQ and is in all releases of EasyOS, it is not a PET. The author is 01micko.

IBM/Red Hat/Fedora

• “In the information age, the value of a firm rests fundamentally on how it stores, shares and processes information,” wrote Seth Benzell, Jonathan Hersh, and Marshall Van Alstyne in a recent paper, How APIs Create Growth by Inverting the Firm. “Digital infrastructure is therefore central to a firm’s success.”

• But, how do digital infrastructures increase a firm’s value? One method is to make more efficient use of the firms internal capital by modularizing, reconfiguring and reusing the firms IT resources. A second method, used in platform businesses, is to leverage external capital by giving access to the firm’s resources to third parties, and capturing a share of the resulting surplus. Both methods require the implementation of Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), whether for only for internal use by the firm’s developers or exposed externally to the firm’s platform partners. Both methods also feature a modular architecture of remixable resources. “Modularity combines the advantages of standardization typically associated with high volume processes together with the advantages of customization typically associated with bespoke processes.”

• “An API is a set of routines, protocols, and tools that standardizes building software applications compatible with an associated program or database. APIs fundamentally are code that control access to information. … They govern the type and format of calls or communications that any application can make of another associated program. The answering program is agnostic about the source of the call, yet can require access permission, and the calling program need not know anything about the internal workings of the answering program. … When designing an API, the architect decides how much of the computer system or data to expose to which users. Being accessible on the web, these API endpoints act as a constant conduit to business processes that the firm itself specifies.”

• The authors developed a novel method to quantify the changes in a firm’s valuation based on its adoption of APIs by analyzing four unique data sets. They then applied their methods to systematically evaluate several different hypotheses on the potential impact of APIs on firms. Let me summarize their evaluation of four of these hypotheses.

Debian Family

• At the start of February we had FOSDEM which was once again online, and I decided to give a talk in the Safety and open source devroom to introduce the concepts of safety argumentation and to bring some attention to how I feel that Subplot could be used in that arena. You can view the talk on the FOSDEM website at some point in the future when they manage to finish transcoding all the amazing talks from the weekend, or if you are more impatient, on Youtube, whichever you prefer.

Devices/Embedded

• Sequent Microsystems has gone to Kickstarter to launch an $18 “Beagle-Pi” emulator board that enables HATs for the hard-to-find Raspberry Pi to run on the Cape expansion interface for the more widely available BeagleBone Black.

• When we checked prices for the Raspberry Pi back in late December for our annual catalog of Linux hacker boards, we found most Raspberry Pi’s available at the usual price, but only from selected vendors in selected configurations with limited quantities and wait times stretching to two months. Since then, the situation has grown worse, as chip shortages have pushed wait times up to a year or more. In Europe, prices have skyrocketed. Raspberry Pi HAT vendor Sequent Microsystems noticed that the venerable BeagleBone Black is still widely available and developed a Beagle-Pi emulator board in the BeagleBone Cape add-on form-factor that enables the BB Black to use Raspberry Pi HATs.

• Another boring week with just a few releases, I even had to reach for Steam Deck content to fill this one up.

• Truth be told, we haven’t jumped on the Wordle bandwagon yet, mainly because we don’t need to be provided with yet another diversion — we’re more than capable of finding our own rabbit holes to fall down, thank you very much. But the word puzzle does look intriguing, and since the rules and the interface are pretty simple, it’s no wonder we’ve seen a few efforts like this automated Wordle solver crop up lately.

Open Hardware/Modding

• Owning an oscilloscope is a real gamechanger and these days, scopes are more capable and less expensive than ever before. However, there is a big difference between scopes that cost several hundred dollars which are usually quite good and many of the very inexpensive — below $100 — instruments that are often — but not always — little more than toys. [Adrian] looks at a PC-based scope from Hantek that costs about $60. Is it a toy? Or a useful tool? He answers the question in the video below.

• The Hantek 6022BE sports two channels with a 20 MHz bandwidth and 48 million samples per second. The device included probes, too. Of course, you also need a PC, although there is apparently third-party software for Android if you don’t want to lug a laptop around.

• “What’s the weather going to be like today?” is a question that’s near-permanently on the mind of those living in places like Britain, where brilliant sunshine can follow thick clouds, only to turn into drizzle an hour later. Nowadays you simply need to glance at your phone to know whether you need to pack an umbrella, but where’s the fun in that? Why not have a huge mechanical display to show you a summary of today’s weather?

• Codasip has announced the L31 and L11 low-power embedded RISC-V processor cores optimized for customization of AI/ML IoT edge applications with power and size constraints.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

•  Intuit Inc. is an American corporation that specializes in financial software. Specfically, the company develops personal finance, accounting, and tax return software.

• The company is headquartered in Mountain View, California. It has more than 10,000 employees.

• While Intuit has a GitHub presence with over 100 repositories for numerous open source projects, none of these repositories offer any substantial desktop software. Instead, the repositories focus on tools and libraries for the developer community. None of these projects have attracted significant interest from the open source community.

• coreboot 4.16 release

• coreboot’s first quarterly release in a number of years, version 4.16 was tagged on February 25th, 2022.

• Since 4.15 there have been more than 1770 new commits by more than 170 developers. Of these, more than 35 contributed to coreboot for the first time.

FSF

GNU Projects

• We are pleased to announce the release of GNUnet 0.16.0. This is a new major release. It breaks protocol compatibility with the 0.15.x versions. Please be aware that Git master is thus henceforth (and has been for a while) INCOMPATIBLE with the 0.15.x GNUnet network, and interactions between old and new peers will result in issues. 0.15.x peers will be able to communicate with Git master or 0.16.x peers, but some services – in particular GNS – will not be compatible. In terms of usability, users should be aware that there are still a number of known open issues in particular with respect to ease of use, but also some critical privacy issues especially for mobile users. Also, the nascent network is tiny and thus unlikely to provide good anonymity or extensive amounts of interesting information. As a result, the 0.16.0 release is still only suitable for early adopters with some reasonable pain tolerance.

• [...]

• This release was the work of many people. The following people contributed code and were thus easily identified: Christian Grothoff, Tristan Schwieren, Alessio Vanni, Florian Dold, Thien-Thi Nguyen, t3sserakt, Lucien Heuzeveldt, Gian Demarmels, madmurphy, TheJackiMonster and Martin Schanzenbach.

Programming/Development

• One of the types of software that’s important for a web developer is the web framework. A framework “is a code library that makes a developer’s life easier when building reliable, scalable, and maintainable web applications” by providing reusable code or extensions for common operations. By saving development time, developers can concentrate on application logic rather than mundane elements.

• A web framework offers the developer a choice about how to solve a specific problem. By using a framework, a developer lets the framework control portions of their application. While it’s perfectly possible to code a web application without using a framework, it’s more practical to use one.

• This is a bit of a sneak preview announcement since I’m waiting for the ISC mirror to update before sending the official announcement to the normal channels, but INN 2.6.5 has been released. (The release was finalized a few days ago, and I’m a bit behind in posting it.)

• This is a bug fix and minor feature release over INN 2.6.4, and the upgrade should be painless. You can download the new release from ftp.isc.org (once it updates) or my personal INN pages. The latter also has links to the full changelog and the other INN documentation.

• Linux applications with QML and Python? Why not? Python is a popular programming language. QML offers an intuitive way to create user interfaces. Kirigami provides useful UI components and implements UI/UX patterns for mobile and desktop. Let’s fit these technologies together and create a simple application.

Leftovers

Science

• Machine learning could one day help energy providers better pinpoint failing or compromised components in power grids, or better identify traffic congestion for local authorities, according to a study.

• A research project led by MIT describes a technique capable of modelling complex interconnected systems made up of numerous variables that change value over time. By mapping connections in these so-called multiple time series, a Bayesian network can learn to identify anomalies in the data.

• What do you do when your motherboard bends your CPU? If you’re [Karta] or [Luumi], you 3D print a new retaining bracket to fix the problem. [Karta] originated the design, and [Luumi] also tried it and produced the video you can see below.

• We think we find flat surfaces all the time, but it is actually very difficult to create something truly flat. You usually learn this when you try to maximize heat transfer between two surfaces. Getting two supposedly flat surfaces to touch is quite hard. CPU brackets use a combination of pressure and some sort of thermal media or paste to fill in any gaps between the CPU case and the heat sink. Intel’s LGA1700 bracket is an example, but there’s been a problem. Apparently, with recent CPUs, the bracket is a little too tight, and it bends the CPU’s case. It doesn’t hurt the CPU, but it does inhibit thermal transfer.

• Others have “fixed” this problem by adding some washers to slightly raise the bracket. In both cases, there has been some very small improvement in CPU temperatures. [Luumi] says part of the problem is his water cooling block is not completely flat and needs to be lapped. [Karta], however, reported a 7 degree drop in temperatures, which is pretty significant.

Hardware

• Technology enables all kinds of possibilities to mold our environments in the way we best see fit. Plenty of ski resorts use snowmaking to extend their seasons, there are wave pools for surfing hundreds of miles away from oceans, and if you don’t live near any mountains you can build your own climbing wall as well. For the latter, many have turned to 3D printers to create more rock-like climbing grips but plastic doesn’t tend to behave the same as rock unless you do what [Giles Barton-Owen] did and incorporate salt into the prints.

• The late 90s and early 2000s were a breakout time for mobile phones, with cheap GSM handsets ushering in the era in which pretty much everybody had a phone. Back then, a popular way to customize one’s phone was to install a sticker that would flash when the phone rang. These required no batteries or any other connection to the phone, and [Big Clive] has dived in to explain how they worked.

Integrity/Availability

Proprietary

Security

• CISA and the Federal Bureau of Investigation have released an advisory on destructive malware targeting organizations in Ukraine. The advisory also provides recommendations and strategies to prepare for and respond to destructive malware.

Privacy/Surveillance

•  Data is one of the most valuable assets available.

• For better or worse, data collection techniques aren’t going anywhere. To be practical, we need all sorts of data to analyze, study, and learn about things.

• Of course, it also brings in the risk of exploiting the data collected, such as malicious agencies getting hold of your browsing data (or internet activity).

• Apple’s AirTags have caused a stir, but for all the wrong reasons. First, they turn all iPhones into Bluetooth LE beacon repeaters, without the owner’s permission. The phones listen for the AirTags, encrypt their location, and send the data on to the iCloud, where the tag’s owner can decrypt the location and track it down. Bad people have figured out that this lets them track their targets without their knowledge, turning all iPhone users into potential accomplices to stalkings, or worse.

• Naturally, Apple has tried to respond by implementing some privacy-protecting features. But they’re imperfect to the point of being almost useless. For instance, AirTags now beep once they’ve been out of range of their owner’s phone for a while, which would surely alert the target that they’re being tracked, right? Well, unless the evil-doer took the speaker out, or bought one with the speaker already removed — and there’s a surprising market for these online.

Defence/Aggression

• As Russia moves aggressively on its objective to invade Ukraine, other countries, especially Sweden and Finland, are concerned. NATO’s reaction force has been launched for the first time in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

• To protect its partners, NATO Supreme Allied Commander Gen. Tod Wolters ordered the response force. This activation of the response force means that any attack on a NATO member will be met with resistance from this multinational force. The mobilisation of this multinational force does not imply that NATO forces will enter Ukraine to defend it against invasion.

• The US president, Joe Biden, has made it clear that the US will not enter Ukraine to confront Russia.

Finance

• “American money stopped being real when the gold standard was abandoned, but Bitcoin is definitely real money because we say so” is certainly a take.

• Gold was “real money” when we used it, because we all agreed that it was.

• If people agree that Bitcoin is “real money” then sure, it’s real money.

• And yet somehow paper money isn’t “real money” even though everyone agrees that it is? Money doesn’t have to be backed by anything but public opinion. That’s what money IS.

Censorship/Free Speech

• Russia has blocked Twitter as it continues its invasion of Ukraine. In Russia, Twitter has the most users (31.1 million messages per month), followed by Odnoklassniki (88.5 million m/month), Instagram (135.1 million m/month), and Vkontakte (408.8 million m/month).

• Today, February 26, NetBlocks, a global internet monitoring service, verifies that Russia began restricting Twitter access on the morning of February 26th, 2022. “The bans apply to numerous providers and come as Russian authorities and social media sites dispute over platform rules related to the crisis with Ukraine,” NetBlocks stated in an article.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• The internet in its current state is an instrument of control and suppression. This becomes especially obvious in the increase in censorship and the introduction of vaccine-passports which are planned to become universal passports for all aspects of our life.

• IFF submitted comments in the ongoing consultation for India Digital Ecosystem Architecture (InDEA) 2.0 released by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology in January 2022. Our core approach is towards ensuring that the rollout of the architecture happens in a manner that safeguards the rights of the user. In our response, we focus on four core data rights-centric issues that we feel are of extreme significance. Comments on this paper have been invited by the Ministry from the public and other stakeholders latest by February 27, 2022.

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