● 03.28.22

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 28/03/2022: Porteus Kiosk 5.4.0 and Debian Secret Votes

Posted in News Roundup at 4:19 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxDistributionsDevices/EmbeddedFree Software/Open SourceLeftovers

GNU/Linux

Kernel Space

Instructionals/Technical

• So… containers, we know them for years now but they still tend to cause us problems thanks to the extra layers of abstraction, storage and… Networking.

• If you’ve ever had to do any remote administration, you’ve probably used or (at least) heard of TeamViewer, which, for many, is the de facto standard for remotely administering desktops and servers with a GUI.

• If you’re using Linux on a Chromebook, you might be interested to know that a new version of Debian just launched. It’s a minor update to version 11, also known as Bullseye, but there are 83 security updates and 92 bug fixes in it.

• Here’s how to upgrade Linux on a Chromebook to Debian 11.3, which is quite easy.

• Stellarium 0.22.0 released! Here’s how to install and keep it up to date in Ubuntu 22.04, Ubuntu 20.04 via PPA.

• Stellarium is a free open source planetarium for Linux, Windows, and macOS. It shows a realistic sky in 3D, just like what you see with the naked eye.

• In this tutorial, we are going to explain the “du” command used on every Linux distribution such as Ubuntu, Debian, or CentOS.

• “Du” stands for Disk Usage and every Linux user should use it very often to check the amount of disk space used by directory or file. Using the “du” command is very simple by typing it on the console and adding additional phrases called options. In other words, the “du” command is different every time, according to the needs of the user and what the user wants to be displayed as output.

• In this blog post, the “du” command will be explained with real examples. Let’s get started!

• If you’re following the Linux space, you might know that Ubuntu doesn’t follow a rolling release structure but two releases every year. However, we’re pretty sure that a lot of people dream about Ubuntu following a rolling-release structure like Arch Linux, though the chances are pretty slim.

• If you’re one of those people who wish Ubuntu was a rolling release, a former Canonical employee has created Rolling Rhino, an unofficial Ubuntu flavor that converts your Ubuntu install into a rolling release distribution.

• Early in my Linux journey, I came to appreciate the numerous command-line utilities of the operating system and the way they streamlined regular tasks. For example, backing up applications on my Windows server frequently required expensive add-on software packages. By contrast, the tar command makes backing up Linux relatively easy, and it’s powerful and reliable too.

• When backing up our school district email system, however, I faced a different challenge. Backups couldn’t occur during the workday or early evening because people were using the system. The backup had to occur after midnight, and it needed to be reliable. I was used to Windows Task Manager, but what was I going to use on Linux? That’s when I learned about cron.

• Traceroute is a network diagnostic tool that is used to display the route that network packages take from sender t receiver as well as the time it takes for the network packages to travel from one network node to the other. This command is used to test the IP route of the destination server or host in order to resolve network issues. It mainly provides the connectivity status but also points the issue precisely as well as its occurrence which makes the system administrators trace out the issue more quickly and fix it.

• At the risk of repeating myself, I must say that Plasma is the best desktop. Period. It is also extremely customizable, but in a fun way. You can use the defaults, never worrying about any tweaking, or if you so desire, you can make visual changes to pretty much anything and everything, with a great level of detail. A good example is Dolphin, Plasma’s default file manager, our topic for today.

• In this article, I want to show you how you can go about changing the look & feel of Dolphin. And to satisfy the bombastic title I used above, I intend to go beyond the pure basics. As in, I won’t talk about changing the size of icons in the sidebar, or removing certain categories and alike. That’s too easy. We’ll actually tweak the look and feel. Follow me.

• From Linux forums to Linux memes, you’ll come across two commands for force ending programs in Linux; kill and killall.

• While many Linux users are aware of the kill command, not many people know and use the killall command.

• And it could be confusing for people anyway. Both commands have similar sounding name and similar purpose (to end processes).

• So, what’s the difference between kill and killall? Which command should you use and in which case should you use them?

• In this tutorial, we will discuss a brief overview about Linux containers and its use cases. Then we will move on to see how to list available container templates from Proxmox web dashboard, download a container template and finally create Proxmox containers using the downloaded container template from Proxmox dashboard.

• In this tutorial, we discuss how you can convert audio files into different formats on Ubuntu with a neat tool called SoundConverter. Before the rise of music streaming services, people bought their music DRM-free. Meaning they bought the music and it was theirs to do whatever they wished to do with, transfer the file to any number of devices, and even share it with others for free. You can see how this wasn’t so good for the music companies but it definitely was convenient for the users. Most of our music is online these days, via various streaming services.

Games

• Steam Next Fest: June Edition 2022 is confirmed to be launching on June 13, so time to make sure you have some space free to install all those demos.

• I’ve managed to find a few new favourites from previous events, so here’s to hoping there’s plenty. Hopefully developers will be getting more of their games with Steam Input support too, since many more people will be playing on a Steam Deck. This time there might even be a special section just for those.

• Awaken Realms Digital has given Linux fans a little gift, with a native Linux build of their popular game Tainted Grail: Conquest now available.

• Tainted Grail: Conquest is set in the dark-fantasy universe of Awaken Realms’ hit board game Tainted Grail: Fall of Avalon. The game combines narrative-driven RPG elements with roguelike deck-building gameplay, offering a unique twist on the genres. Players set out on the cursed island of Avalon, where an ever-changing map filled with deadly enemies awaits. With a deep character customization suite across nine distinctive classes of heroes plus dozens of skills, runestones, and items available, each play-through brings a unique set of challenges.

• SteamTinkerLaunch is an excellent solution (and probably not as well known as it should be!) if you want to manage different version and different options of Proton within Steam (and much more than that, such as FSR settings, Reshade…). Turns out that FrostWork (the main developer) has now access to a Deck and you may see SteamTinkerLaunch on Steam Deck…

• I am big fan of Box86 and Box64 (as well as pretty much everything PtitSeb does) and a few months ago he made it possible to run some Linux Games on Steam (using the mini-mode, the full client is not yet supported). And the latest development, and that’s a major one, is that Box86 can now run some Windows games on Steam by using Proton! Here’s a video of two of such games: Geometry Dash and Among Us on a ARM mini PC (Pythium D2000 + AMD Rx550):

• Valve’s Steam Deck is adept at running everything from indie PC games like Tunic to power-hungry AAA titles like Cyberpunk 2077 and Elden Ring. But it’s rapidly becoming known for another strength: its ability to emulate a vast range of retro and current consoles, from the Atari 2600 all the way up to the Nintendo Switch. Getting everything set up to do that, however, can be a lengthy and arduous process, something a brand new app called EmuDeck aims to make much easier.

Distributions

• Coming about 11 months after GParted 1.3, the GParted 1.4 release is here to add labeling support for mounted btrfs, EXT2, EXT3, EXT4, and XFS file systems, implements detection of JBD external EXT3 and EXT4 journal, adds the ability to check copy destination instead of source, and as well as bcache detection.

• It also adds accessibility relations for screen readers like Orca, updates additional getter methods to use return-by-constant-reference, and adds initial translation for Indonesian users of the help manual.

New Releases

• Feren OS is an interesting Ubuntu-based distro. The latest update is it’s first for this year due to a minor delay.

• The new update introduces some new features, replaces the text editor, and more. You can learn more about it in our coverage.

Gentoo Family

• Porteus Kiosk 5.4 is here more than five months after Porteus Kiosk 5.3 to bump the kernel version from Linux 5.10 LTS to the latest long-term supported branch, namely Linux 5.15 LTS, which will receive maintenance updates until October 2023. As you can imagine, this means better hardware support and the ability for Porteus Kiosk to run on more devices.

• Besides Linux kernel 5.15 LTS, the Porteus Kiosk 5.4 release is here to add implement the import_certificates= parameter for importing DER certificates, add support for dynamically generated remote configurations to allow you to pass Kiosk identification and settings through specific URLs.

• I’m pleased to announce that Porteus Kiosk 5.4.0 is now available for download.

SUSE/OpenSUSE

• Submitting bug reports related to openSUSE’s traditional release over the years had some abnormalities as reporting bugs for Leap’s distribution had SUSE Linux Enterprise considerations.

• A the distribution evolved from the Leap 42.1 hybrid to the binary compatible Leap 15.3 release and exorbitant reporting was necessary. The abnormalities of the process before caused contributors to be unable to see bugs referenced as fixes for SLE, which made it into Leap, but were not able to view them in bugzilla.opensuse.org.

• That has now been streamlined, according to an email from Leap release manager Lubos Kocman.

• “I’m excited to inform you that the days when developers were struggling to find Public SUSE Linux Enterprise * Bugzilla products (where all bugs are by default visible to the community) are finally over,” Kocman posted to the developer’s mailing list. “Public SLE products can be now seen in the default “Enter new bug” dialog at bugzilla.opensuse.org.”

• It has been almost two years since the team at SUSE reimagined the framework of our partner program. In response to the changing demands of the market and the channel, we set out to build a structure around six areas of specialization. Each was created with unique partner types in mind, and provides the ability for organizations to adapt, accelerate, and grow their business practice as technology trends and customer requirements continue their evolution.

IBM/Red Hat/Fedora

• The upcoming Fedora release 36 (due end of April 2022) and beyond, and ELN (Enterprise Linux Next, what would become RHEL) will have default Malayalam script fonts as RIT Rachana and Meera New fonts. In addition, Sundar, TNJoy, Panmana and Ezhuthu fonts are now available in the official repositories. This brings Malayalam fonts that are modern (Unicode 13 compatible), well-maintained, having perfect complex-script shaping and good metadata to the users of Fedora, RHEL, CentOS & downstream OSen. I have made all the necessary updates in the upstream projects (which I maintain) and packaged them for Fedora (which also I maintain).

• Digital transformation: The term has been around for years but its meaning often remains vague and largely undefined, even for IT decision-makers.

• As a result, in 2021, an estimated $700 billion in digital transformation spending fell short of delivering the desired results. Common reasons include an overwhelming number of applications in an organization’s tech stack, a lack of technical knowledge to deploy new solutions, and resistance from employees to adopt new digital technologies.

• Customer experience (CX) gets a lot of hype, and for good reason. The marketplace is saturated with gadgets, applications, services, and products to make people’s lives easier. Need to get from your office to the airport? A ridesharing app is just one tap away from getting you from point A to point B. But whether you use Uber, Lyft, or another service all comes down to a few simple factors: price, ease of use, and experience. In a competitive landscape, let’s assume price is comparable. So by the process of elimination, a seamless customer experience is everything.

• In our digital culture, it’s easier than ever for businesses to understand where their shortcomings lie. Customers vote with their wallets every day and they’re not shy about sharing their opinions. But what if the customers we’re talking about are your employees, and perhaps they’re not so vocal about the products and services they’re using? Or worse – what if they are and nothing is done about it?

• Are you looking for the shortest path or cheatsheet to bring your Java application into a serverless platform based on Kubernetes? Perhaps you don’t have enough time to stand up relevant infrastructure and configure settings for both the application and the platform. This article is a guide to developing Java serverless functions using a Quarkus quick start in the Developer Sandbox for Red Hat OpenShift. As you’ll see, using quick starts in the Developer Sandbox lets you focus on the application development without needing to configure Knative.

• The Developer Sandbox provides a shared, multi-tenant Red Hat OpenShift 4 cluster with a cloud IDE tool called Red Hat CodeReady Workspaces. All you need is a free account on Red Hat to get access for a limited time to a sandbox. Following the four steps in this article, you can stand up your own cluster in 10 minutes.

• PostgreSQL is an advanced open source relational database that is commonly used by applications to store structured data. Before accessing a database, the application must connect and provide security credentials. As a Node.js developer, how can you safely share and provide those credentials in JavaScript code without a lot of work? This article introduces service bindings and the kube-service-bindings package, along with a convenient graphical interface in Red Hat OpenShift.

• When using a database, the four basic operations are create, read, update, and delete (CRUD, for short). Our team maintains an example CRUD application on GitHub that shows how to connect to a PostgreSQL database and execute the four basic operations. We use that example to illustrate the security model in this article.

Debian Family

• The Debian project has been voting on a general resolution that would allow secret voting on future issues. The results have been posted in unofficial form, and the winner was “proposal B”: “Hide identities of Developers casting a particular vote and allow verification”. One might think that closes the discussion, but Debian project leader candidate Felix Lechner is questioning the election and calling for it to be redone — something that the Debian constitution lacks provisions for.

Devices/Embedded

• Chinese company MangoPi made a bit of splash earlier this year by introducing a pair of tiny computer boards powered by RISC-V processors. Now the company is showing off a new computer-on-a-module that’s smaller than an SD card, but which packs four ARM Cortex-A53 CPU cores, supports Linux-based software, and can handle 1080p video playback at 60 Hz through an HDMI output (although you’ll need to connect a carrier board to get that HDMI port, since there are no ports on the module itself).

• Details about the new module are light at the moment, but it appears to be called the “Linux-Box” and there’s a little more information at the MangoPi forum and on Twitter, which is how we know it’ll probably ship with an Allwinner H616 processor.

Open Hardware/Modding

• The Librem line, PureOS, and Librem One is the foundation for expansion. The Librem line: Librem 14 laptop, Librem 5 phone, Librem 5 USA (with Made in USA Electronics) phone, Librem Key, Librem Mini, Librem Servers. With the Librem line we have a well rounded hardware offering that runs PureOS.

• PureOS: A GNU-based 100% free software truly convergent operating system developed and maintained by Purism pushes the boundaries across our hardware innovations to have a single easy-to-use OS that is on pace to rival the giants. Purism’s PureOS was also where all the development occurs for what we later pushed into GNOME; phosh, phoc, libhandy (now libadwaita), squeekboard, calls, chats, and the long list of adaptive applications. Other companies are adopting PureOS as their base OS for other industries, automotive, drones, IOT, and services; including our very own Librem One.

• Librem One initially a reference platform, will see tighter integration into PureOS and the Librem line since it directly impacts the long-term goal of Purism: to make beautiful convenient products that respect the rights of humans. The ‘convenient’ part of that continues to be a major investment we make.

• While digital display technologies exist for just about every possible use case, sometimes you want the aesthetics that only electromechanical displays provide. Many makers have built electromechanical seven-segment displays for this purpose, but they are usually driven by noisy servo motors. David McDaid wanted something quieter and created this silent electromechanical four-digit seven-segment display for use as a wall clock.

• Like most similar displays, this uses an individual motor for each segment of each digit. For four digits, that is a total of 28 motors. 28 servo motors get quite noisy, which is why McDaid employed stepper motors paired with silent drivers. Those are typically used for 3D printers in order to make those printers less annoying, but they work well for this project, too. Those stepper motors only need to tilt their respective segments by 90 degrees to “turn off” that segment, so little torque was required.

• It’s been possible to use the I2S for video output on ESP8266 and ESP32 chips for years, but aquaticus’ ESP32 Composite Video Library is may simplify the task of outputting PAL, NTSC, or SECAM video signals from any Tensilica-based ESP32 platforms.

• The library does not require any external hardware, and you can just connect an RCA connector to GPIO25 (I2S data) and GND, plus integration with the LVGL library makes it easy to create graphical user interfaces as showcased with the captures below.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• XMPP stands for Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol which is a set of technologies for instant messaging, audio/ and video communication, team collaboration, online presence information, and multi-party chat.

• XMPP works by passing small, structured chunks of XML data between endpoints (clients) via intermediary servers

• Many companies in different sectors require XMPP servers to setup collaboration messaging platforms either for their internal teams or for instant client-support.

• XAMPP requires a server and a client. The client can be a desktop, mobile, or a web app.

• In this article, we offer you a list of open-source XMPP servers which anyone can use to setup his own messaging platform.

• The traffic light coalition must anchor its goals for the digitisation of Germany, based on Free Software, as set out in the coalition agreement in the 2022 federal budget. Otherwise, there is a risk of cementing dependencies on individual vendors and losing sovereignty and innovative power.

• Together with other associations and organisations such as the Open Source Business Alliance and the Open Knowledge Foundation Germany, the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) demands to include digital sovereignty in the 2022 federal budget and implement already announced initiatives for software freedom. In an open letter, the signatories address the government groups in the Bundestag and demand that the goals for the digitalisation of Germany, based on Free Software, as set out in the coalition agreement, also be anchored in the 2022 federal budget.

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

Programming/Development

• An even newer hot-fix release 1.0.8.3 of Rcpp follows the 1.0.8.2 release of a few days ago and got to CRAN this morning. A Debian upload will follow shortly, and Windows and macOS binaries will appear at CRAN in the next few days. This release again breaks with the six-months cycle started with release 1.0.5 in July 2020. When we addressed the CRAN request in 1.0.8.2 we forgot to dial testing down to their desired level (as ‘three-part’ release numbers do automagically for us, whereas ‘four-part’ do not). This is now taken care of, along with the hot-fix that was in 1.0.8.2 already.

• A minor maintenance release of the RcppCNPy package arrived on CRAN three days ago, but we skipped announcing it right then.

• RcppCNPy provides R with read and write access to NumPy files thanks to the cnpy library by Carl Rogers along with Rcpp for the glue to R.

• curl supports a large number of third party libraries. In a build, those libraries become “dependencies”. These components offer functionality and features that we don’t implement ourselves but still have been deemed interesting or even crucial to support to do Internet transfers the way we want.

• A curl build done today can use one or more out of 35 different libraries. No build can actually use all of them at once as many are mutually exclusive and most of them only work on one or a subset of platforms.

Perl/Raku

• Jonathan Worthington announced an updated Comma Roadmap. With native support for the Mac M1 processor, more module creation / maintenance support and lots of interesting new debugging facilities. All made possible by those of you buying a Comma Complete edition!

Java

• For decades, developers have struggled with optimizing persistence layer implementation in terms of storing business data, retrieving relevant data quickly, and—most importantly— simplifying data transaction logic regardless of programming languages.

• Fortunately, this challenge triggered the invention of Java ecosystems in which developers can implement the Java Persistence API (JPA). For instance, Hibernate Object Relational Mapper (ORM) with Panache is the standard framework for JPA implementation in the Java ecosystem.

Leftovers

• Google is currently in the process of killing Hangouts. Last year Hangouts was quite a nice IM system with integrated video chat and voice calling. Now they have decided to kill it and replace it with “Google Chat” and “Google Meet” both of which are integrated with the Gmail app on Android. To start getting people off the old platform they have disabled video and audio chats with more than 2 people in Hangouts. To do a video call you have to use Meet which has a worse user interface and isn’t integrated with text chat, so if in a text discussion someone says “let’s have a video call” you have to open a new app. Meet also doesn’t appear to have a facility to notify group members that someone has joined a group call so it’s required that Chat (or something else) is used to tell people they can join Meet.

Integrity/Availability

Proprietary

Security

• Muhstik, a botnet infamous for propagating via web application exploits, has been observed targeting Redis servers using a recently disclosed vulnerability in the database system.

• Google has released Chrome version 99.0.4844.84 for Windows, Mac, and Linux. This version addresses a vulnerability that an attacker could exploit to take control of an affected system.

• Security updates have been issued by Debian (chromium and faad2), Fedora (dotnet3.1, libass, linux-firmware, python-paramiko, seamonkey, and xen), openSUSE (perl-DBD-SQLite and wavpack), Slackware (seamonkey), SUSE (perl-DBD-SQLite and wavpack), and Ubuntu (binutils, python2.7, python3.4, python3.5, python3.6, python3.8, and smarty3).

• Binding Operational Directive (BOD) 22-01: Reducing the Significant Risk of Known Exploited Vulnerabilities established the Known Exploited Vulnerabilities Catalog as a living list of known CVEs that carry significant risk to the federal enterprise. BOD 22-01 requires FCEB agencies to remediate identified vulnerabilities by the due date to protect FCEB networks against active threats. See the BOD 22-01 Fact Sheet for more information.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Whitney joined Jerm Warfare for a conversation covering her journey into journalism and Chile; fact-checkers; Bill Gates; central intelligence; Facebook versus mass surveillance; Jeffrey Epstein; 9/11; why people fear conspiracy theories; and parallel structures.

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