● 03.03.22

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 3/3/2022: KDE Gear 21.12.3

Posted in News Roundup at 8:34 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxDistributionsDevices/EmbeddedFree Software/Open SourceLeftovers

GNU/Linux

Audiocasts/Shows

• Bonus 1: Canonical will not be acquired

• The History of Berkeley DB, modern inetd in FreeBSD, the Unix argv[0] issue, retrocomputing can be more than games, read section 8 of the Unix users manual, and more.

Benchmarks

• The SPEC Graphics Performance Characterization (SPECgpc) group updated the Windows version of the workstation GPU benchmark suite – SPECviewperf 2020 – twice last year. The intent of the benchmark is to replay GPU workload traces from real-world professional applications (Maya for media and entertainment, Catia, Creo, NX, and Solidworks for CAD/CAM, OpendTect for the energy industry, and the Tuvok visualization library for rendering medical images). Version 3.0, released in December 2021, updated the Solidworks viewset to better reflect the OpenGL API calls in the latest version of the software. Version 2.0 had enabled selective downloading of the viewsets. While the Windows version of the benchmark had been through three versions, the Linux community was left out, having to rely on the SPECviewperf 13 released almost a decade ago. That is changing today with the availability of the Linux edition of SPECviewperf 2020 v3.0. The benchmark updates the viewsets with traces from the latest versions of the relevant applications and also updates the models to match the Windows version. Since the benchmarks wrapper framework (even for the Windows version) is based on Node-Webkit (now NW.js), the creation of a Linux edition had to mainly deal with the actual viewset processing. Automation and results processing are identical between the Windows and Linux versions.

• The Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation’s (SPEC) Graphics Performance Characterization (SPECgpc) today released a Linux Edition of its SPECviewperf 2020 v3.0 performance benchmark, the worldwide standard for measuring graphics performance based on professional applications.

Instructionals/Technical

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Zoom Client on Manjaro 21. For those of you who didn’t know, Zoom is a software solution that provides video and online chat services through a cloud-based peer-to-peer software platform. The Zoom software application lets you organize meetings, host webinars, and open conference rooms for meetings online. 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 Zoom Client on a Manjaro 21 (Pahvo).

• Redundancy with automated failover is good. But making the wrong decisions can make a high-availability solution worse than no redundancy at all.

• Notepad++ is a free and powerful tool that you can use to edit both texts and source code. The famous editor is initially designed for Windows PCs and written in C language with pure Win32 API that ensures higher execution speed. This makes it possible to optimize routines without sacrificing user-friendliness, which reduces carbon emissions from your computer when using less power consumption resulting in a greener environment. In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install Notepad++ on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy Jellyfish using Snap (Snapcraft.io) as a means to install Wine to emulate Windows and Notepad++.

• Notepadqq is a free and open-source text editor program for Linux. It’s an alternative to Notepad++, which many programmers and even general desktop power users often use as their notepad of choice due to its ease and minimalism it offers, while others prefer its more robust features, such as multiline editing or variables scope overloading. In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install NotepadQQ on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy Jellyfish using two different methods with APT and Flatpak as an alternative installation method of installing Notepad++ using the snap package manager and wine.

• Although the web server market is largely dominated by Nginx and Apache HTTPD, there are other alternatives. That is why today, you will learn how to install Caddy web server on Rocky Linux / Alma Linux 8 / CentOS 8.

• While working with Linux, we find that access to some files or performing sensitive operations requires users to have elevated privileges. The sudo command temporarily elevates user privileges allowing a user to execute sensitive commands or access files without restrictions.

• Setup SFTP and Prevent SSH on Ubuntu 20.04. SFTP (Secure File transfer Protocol), a secure way to transfer files to servers using encrypted SSH connections. All servers with SSH will have SFTP enabled by default. In this guide you are going to learn how to limit SFTP access to a directory for a particular user and prevent SSH access. This setup is tested on a virtual machine running Ubuntu 20.04 OS. So this tutorial should work on any severs with Ubuntu.

• In the previous installment of the Quarkus from the ground up series, you saw the beginnings of a fully functional, OpenAPI-compliant REST API built using Quarkus. That article covered all of the architectural layers, from managing database schemas with Flyway to building the API itself with RESTEasy Reactive. You saw happy-path use cases, but didn’t get into the concepts around error handling. In this article, you’ll dive into error handling, build a solid error response model, and see how you can help API consumers reduce toil in their work.

Wine or Emulation

• Not to be confused with VKD3D-Proton that the Valve team work on, the original vkd3d from the Wine team continues to be updated and a new release is out now. For anyone confused, both of them translate Direct3D 12 to Vulkan. For one thing, Valve is naturally focused only on gaming, which can often come with the drawback of needing the most up to date drivers and not supporting older systems, whereas the Wine team have to support pretty much any software that could run on Windows.

Games

• September 13th 1993, colloquially known as Mortal Monday, became as dividing line in the battle for 16-bit supremacy. The mega popular arcade game Mortal Kombat was ported to Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis consoles, and every fanboy and fangirl had an opinion on which version truly brought the hits. The Super Nintendo version opted to remove the blood and gore in an attempt to preserve the company’s family-friendly image. While the Sega Genesis merely locked the game’s more violent content behind a cheat code that so many fans learned by heart, ABACABB. Nintendo’s decision to censor Mortal Kombat on their console pushed public opinion in favor of the Sega Genesis version being superior, though it was clear that corners were cut in order to squeeze it onto a cartridge. Recently a group of developers led by [Paulo] sought to restore the Genesis version to its full potential with a ROM hack they’re calling Mortal Kombat Arcade Edition.

• Want to support the people of Ukraine and get a little something in return perhaps? There’s a huge amount of developers throwing their support in and even John Romero has appeared with a new DOOM II level. Named “One Humanity”, it’s available for a donation of €5.00 and it’s to “support the people of Ukraine and the humanitarian efforts of the Red Cross and the UN Central Emergency Response Fund” with 100% of the proceeds going towards the support.

• Even more developers get their games ready to be played on the Steam Deck! SimplePlanes looks like a lot of fun and it’s quite a popular one too. Not quite as simple as the name suggests though, with tons of parts to snap together and plenty of physics fun going on. It’s also not just about aircraft, as you can build all sorts of things to mess around with.

• Love trains? Tracks looks like quite a sweet little game really and it has a new release out to help with Steam Deck compatibility. Tracks hasn’t yet been through any verification though, keep that in mind.

• In the field of the gaming sector, Steam Deck is the hotcake of this month. This new gaming console is not like the previous console projects, and Valve brought it to an entirely new level of gaming. We all know that Steam is dominating the World gaming section for the last two decades. And now, Steam deck appears to bring all the steam games just within your two palms. The world’s best games are already available for Steam Deck. So, it is the best news for Linux users in 2022. The steam deck was launched on 25 February 2022, and our team already got our desired gaming console. We had a list of a considerable number of games to try and check their performance on Steam Deck. And now, we are here to share the best games for the Steam deck we got from the long research.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• Over 120 individual programs plus dozens of programmer libraries and feature plugins are released simultaneously as part of KDE Gear. Today they all get new bugfix source releases with updated translations, including…

• KDE Gear 21.12.3 is here with a bunch of bug fixes for various KDE apps, such as the Dolphin file manager, which no longer crashes when canceling an archiving job initiated from one of the available “Compress” right-click context menu items. Moreover, Dolphin now opens files in the right app when browsing an FTP server instead of opening them in the web browser by default. The Ark archive manager received various updates in this release to allow extracting of zip archives with empty folders without causing those folders to have their “last accessed” dates set in the future, as well as to successfully create multivolume 7zip archives consisting of individual parts of under 1MB in size each.

Distributions

SUSE/OpenSUSE

• The motivation of this post is to demonstrate how easy and logical is the workflow of an upstream change in a project to a given SUSE Linux codestream. I try to write this post in a codestream agnostic way. As I have experienced the workflow from the package maintainer point of view is the same for SUSE:SLE-15:Update and for openSUSE:Factory.

IBM/Red Hat/Fedora

• In 2022, open source is becoming more and more of a household name. But for many years, open source was known as the scrappy underdog of the enterprise IT landscape. Open source has been around for decades in some form or fashion, but it wasn’t even until the late 1990s that it was formalized with its name. You may have been using open source technology this whole time but didn’t know it. In fact, the website you are currently reading is run on the open source content management system, Drupal. Your car, laptop, smartwatch, and video games are likely supported by Linux, an open source operating system. Red Hat’s annual State of Enterprise Open Source was recently released containing a whole lot of insights helpful for anyone growing a career in open source technology. For starters, 77% of IT leaders have a more positive perception of enterprise open source than they did a year ago and 82% of IT leaders are more likely to select a vendor who contributes to the open source community. This means that participating in open source is more important than ever before. Now is the time to advance your open source journey, no matter where you are. Here are a few resources to help you along the way.

• 2022 marks the fourth year Red Hat has sponsored its annual The State of Enterprise Open Source report. With almost 1300 worldwide IT leaders surveyed, this annual survey provides a window into trends and selectively explores new topics of interest. Let’s take a look at some stats from each category. One key trend is the growth of enterprise open source software at the expense of proprietary software. This year, respondents said they expect proprietary software to drop from 45 percent of their organizations’ software to 37 percent in two years, while enterprise open source grows 5 percent to 34 percent – almost overtaking it. (Community-based open source software is expected to chip away at the proprietary share of the mix as well, albeit at a slower rate.)

• The pandemic will be the zeitgeist for the 21st century. It has shaped how we live, how our children are educated, and of course, how we work. It has also exposed what employees crave most. These wants and needs happen to be one of the driving factors for why employees leave their organizations, especially in today’s new hybrid workplace. A December 2020 SHRM article found that nearly 70 percent of remote workers say they work on the weekends, with 45 percent noting they work more hours weekly than they did prior to going remote. In the hybrid work environment, we are spending extraordinary amounts of time on the job. It can lead to feeling even more burned out and isolated than ever. Couple those feelings with our intrinsic need for connection, belonging, and relationships, and it’s easy to understand why employees leave organizations where they feel disconnected and unappreciated. The hybrid workforce demands a different organization-employee dynamic. Given how siloed we are, these desires for connection, belonging, and relationships are more important than ever. Employees want to feel valued, appreciated, and cared for by their managers and organizations. Today’s employees also want to trust their organizations and managers as well as feel trusted by them.

• This is the latest in our monthly series summarizing the past month on the Community Blog.

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

• OpenStack is dead! A masked man in a black cloak with “public clouds”, “containers” and ”serverless” inscriptions shot OpenStack straight in the heart. OpenStack fell to the ground and with the last moment of strength exclaimed: “Long live open infrastructure”! That could be a headline of a tabloid, would you agree? OpenStack is dead. We’ve all heard about that. It’s gone. It’s abandoned. It’s been dominated by public clouds. The world does no longer need OpenStack. The word only needs containers, serverless or the next cutting-edge technology (whatever it’s going to be). The world doesn’t like OpenStack anymore. OpenStack is an obsolete technology. It is antiquated, passe and definitely no longer sexy. What is the problem then? Well, the problem is that none of these things is real.

• By certifying Advantech products, Canonical, the publisher of Ubuntu, guarantees up to 10 years of Linux security and update capabilities for users in the AI robotics, industrial manufacturing, and mission-critical application sectors. The two companies have collaborated on the provision of Ubuntu certifications for deployment-ready IoT devices, so that users can save time when configuring/installing the OS on the hardware. Canonical performs tests that confirm industrial-grade standards for the Ubuntu running on the system. These tests also ensure that individual hardware I/O function normally. Once completed, Advantech will issue a comprehensive test report that reduces the hardware and OS validation procedure from ten days to one. Additionally, pre-installed services can save over 30 minutes in lead-time per device. In order to prevent security breaches and maintain system functionality, AIoT developers are required to keep their devices up to date with the latest software. To address this, Canonical and Advantech have certified Ubuntu Core, a transactional version of Ubuntu designed for IoT devices and embedded systems that provides secure boot, full disk encryption, secure device recovery, and over-the-air, transactional software updates through a cloud-based CI/CD (Continuous Integration, Continuous Deployment) service that helps to lower upgrade risks and reduces the need for on-site repair.

Devices/Embedded

Open Hardware/Modding

• We first heard about Chiplet, chips that gather IP or chips from different vendors into a single chip, in 2020 with the now-defunct zGlue’s Open Chiplet Initiative, but the term recently came back to the forefront last month with Intel’s investment into the “Open Chiplet Platform” that aims to offer a modular approach to chip design through chiplets with each block/chiplet customized for a particular function. It turns out there’s now an official standard called the Universal Chiplet Interconnect Express (UCIe) whose specification defines the interconnect between chiplets within a package, and not only backed by Intel, but also AMD, Arm, ASE, Google Cloud, Meta, Microsoft, Qualcomm, Samsung, and TSMC.

• Ynvisible Interactive will soon release upgrades to their printed flexible E-paper displays that consume 50% less energy per switch and can last 10 longer when switched on and off, with the company claiming to offer the lowest energy-consuming displays in the e-paper industry. Those displays are mostly used in specific industries such as digital signage, smart monitoring labels, authenticity & security, and retail. While we have very little information about the new upgrades, I’ve noticed the company is offering a development kit with several “ultra-low-power, thin and flexible Segment E-Paper Displays”, so let’s have a look.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• Vendors of the FOSS hardware and software communities are voicing their concerns about closed-source firmware. Virtually impenetrable BLOBs (Binary Large Objects) in firmware mean it’s difficult to be sure exactly what the computer is doing. Assuming the BLOBs are unencrypted, and they usually are, you’ll have to break out a disassembler to figure out what the code does, which requires skills and knowledge, and is tedious – especially if the binary is obfuscated. Hardware vendors provide software, too. You can’t boot a computer without multiple pieces of code in various flash ROMs – to initialize the processor, the disk drives, and the chips that connect them. As computers get more complex, so does their firmware. More layers of code not only means more potential vulnerabilities, it means they can be hidden from the running OS. This requires blind trust, which is a strong motivator for keeping the source code of such code open. For the very privacy-conscious, there are x86 laptops such as Purism’s Librem machines which use the coreboot open-source firmware, which is also used in Chromebooks. It’s not only for consumer kit. So does the LinuxBoot firmware for servers, which is backed by Google and Facebook via the Open Compute Project. Despite some controversy, it’s working on version 2 of its spec. Both coreboot and LinuxBoot use Intel’s FSP (Firmware Support Package) to initialize the hardware.

• Rocket.Chat is one of the best open-source slack alternatives and Nextcloud is an all-in-one collaboration platform. And, they are pretty impressive. This is why we use Rocket.Chat for our internal communication and Nextcloud to manage tasks/documents. Both of them are incredibly useful for what they are capable of. And, now, it looks like Rocket.Chat and Nextcloud are taking things up a notch by developing a native API integration.

• In recent years, interest in using open source collaboration platforms to enhance business productivity increased. Proprietary software has managed to overwhelm customers with a maze of licensing requirements and pay-to-play features that many companies don’t want to manage. On the other hand, open source offers alternatives that give companies the liberty of choice and allow new businesses to enter existing markets easier with more control over upfront costs. There are many choices in open source when selecting collaborative suites. My favorite is the AGPL-licensed Community Edition of Carbonio by Zextras (you may know Zextras from their complementary components for Zimbra Open Source).

Programming/Development

• We are excited to release a new major version of the Squish GUI Tester, the software quality assurance tool chosen by thousands worldwide for cross-platform GUI application test automation.

Perl/Raku

• Lizmat kindly allowed Label to expose its file and line-number. That is handy if we want to convey messages about the code itself, without having to worry about edits invalidating our line-numbers. The first use case that came to mind are lightweight singletons that are easy to find.

Leftovers

Science

• Something that probably unites most Hackaday readers is a love of machines, particularly unique or interesting ones. In the world of aircraft for example, we’ve run several stories about those which push the edges of the size envelope, be they the Hughes Hercules troop carrier, the Scaled Composites Stratolifter space launcher, or the Antonov An-225 Mriya cargo plane. This last machine has been in the news for all the wrong reasons over the last few days, with reports emerging that it may have been destroyed in the fighting around its base at Hostomel near Kyiv. There has been some uncertainty around this news as it has alternately been claimed to have been destroyed or to have miraculously survived, but now a set of photographs have emerged showing what appears to be the An-225 burning in its damaged hangar.

Integrity/Availability

Proprietary

Security

• Google has just issued a warning towards its “circa three billion Chrome users” globally. The company confirmed brand new “high” level attacks directly on its browser.

• It’s not uncommon for red teamers to regularly tear down and rebuild their test labs, I know I do on a sometimes daily basis. It keeps things fresh and manageable, and now, using Infrastructure as Code (IaC), we can create a consistent environment to test tools and techniques in. If we break something it’s fine, just run the script again! In this post I’ll detail how, using Packer, Terraform, and Ansible, to go from an empty ESXi server to an up and running Windows domain in minimum time.

Defence/Aggression

• War is NEVER the solution War destroys lives War destroys cities War destroys nature War destroys economy War will destroy our planet Please STOP WAR NOW! Everywhere

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