● 03.28.22

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 28/03/2022: Slax 11.3 and Another New Red Hat Manager (From Cisco)

Posted in News Roundup at 2:03 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxDistributionsDevices/EmbeddedFree Software/Open SourceLeftovers

GNU/Linux

• Welcome to this week’s Linux Weekly Roundup.

• We had a peaceful week in the world of Linux Releases, with only the release of Parrot 5.0.

• I hope you will have a wonderful week.

Audiocasts/Shows

• For a long time Matrix has used Jitsi for it’s call infrastructure but this poses an issue, it adds a single point of failure for group calls which for something like Matrix doesn’t make sense so now Matrix finally supports calls over the Matrix network.

Applications

• Drawing is an alternative to MS Paint for Linux, and it’s part of the GNOME Circle initiative.

• Drawing, like Microsoft Paint, is a simple image editor. You may draw arrows, lines, geometrical forms, add colors, and do other things in this open-source application that you would expect to do in a conventional drawing application.

• This simple image editor for Linux desktops is modeled after Microsoft Paint, so it’s not trying to compete with GIMP or position itself as a Photoshop competitor. Instead, it’s simple software for simple use-cases. Drawing supports various image formats, including JPG, PNG, and BMP.

• There are quite a few image editing tools for Linux desktop. ‘Drawing’ is the one that promoted itself a Microsoft Paint alternative for Linux.

• The app provides basic editing features, including crop, resize, skew and rotate images, apply simple filters, insert or censor text. As well, it supports for drawing with pencil, straight line, curve tool, many shapes, several brushes, with colors and other common used options.

• Ubuntu is considered a good distribution for beginners who usually want to learn Linux from scratch. In comparison between OS software, it is far better than windows. The integral part of system administration is File compression. It might be quite a tough task to find a reliable file compression tool. Till now many robust compression tools with better compression rates and the period has been developed which make backing up system data easier. So here we have listed the 10 top compression tools which will help out to choose the best compression tool.

Instructionals/Technical

• Most servers these days have an IPMI, including more or less all of ours. One of the standard IPMI functions is a ‘system event log’, which stores ‘events’ with timestamps, which means that the IPMI needs to have a clock. Some of our IPMIs are both connected to a network and support maintaining their time through NTP, but most of our IPMIs are either disconnected or at least don’t support NTP (as far as I know). This means that their clocks are what’s called ‘free running’. In completely unsurprising news, these clocks drift.

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install MySQL Workbench on Debian 11. For those of you who didn’t know, MySQL Workbench is a unified visual tool for database architects, developers, and DBAs. In short, it provides a graphical user interface to design and edit databases, display them clearly, and manage them easily. Workbench can be used on computers with the Linux, macOS, or Microsoft Windows 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 through the step-by-step installation of the MySQL Workbench on a Debian 11 (Bullseye).

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install OpenRGB on Linux Mint 20. For those of you who didn’t know, OpenRGB earlier known as OpenAuraSDK is a free and open source application to control RGB lighting for a multitude of devices, independent of the manufacturer. OpenRGB also comes with a plugin interface that can extend the software’s functionality even further. It’s available for Linux and Microsoft Windows.

• 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 an OpenRGB on a Linux Mint 20 (Ulyana).

• Today we are going to look at how to install Viber on Zorin OS 16.

• Firstly, we update the repositories of our system, and with the second command, we will install the application.

• Today we are looking at how to install fonts on a Chromebook for Linux applications. Please follow the video/audio guide as a tutorial where we explain the process step by step and use the commands below.

Games

• In the past two days the number of games validated for the Steam Deck has jumped pretty fast once more. There are now more than 1900 games working on the Steam Deck – (1914 at the time of writing) in two categories as usual…

Distributions

• We review the top 10 best Linux distributions for programmers and developers (in 2022) to help with their work and personal projects.

• The main reason why developers keep creating and distributing new Linux-based OSes is that they simply can. The Linux kernel is free. The apps are free. The resources to create a whole operating system on top of the kernel are free.

• Nowadays, people rarely create a distro from scratch. Instead, they take another popular distro and either build a new OS using the former one as a base or reskin it with a new graphical user interface and added applications.

New Releases

• I am happy to announce that an incremental update of Slax, labeled as version 11.3.0, is now available for download. Current release updates packages to the newest versions available in latest Debian 11.3, and fixes a minor issue in application launcher.

• This Slax version was made possible by generous supporters at Patreon. If you like to see more releases in the future and you like to become a part of the growing community of people who are interested in supporting Slax regularly,

SUSE/OpenSUSE

• “As we grow, containers are the most sensible and coherent direction for us to take. Working with SUSE Rancher, we get the most out of Kubernetes while reducing our management burden.” Philipp-Michael Radl, Senior Systems Engineer, DIMOCO.

IBM/Red Hat/Fedora

• We’re delighted to welcome Tammy Tan to Red Hat as the country manager for Malaysia, where she will be responsible for Red Hat’s business operations in one of Red Hat’s key Southeast Asia emerging markets. Tan brings over 21 years of experience in the IT industry and comes from a STEM background. Prior to her current role at Red Hat, Tan served as director of enterprise and commercial at Cisco Malaysia. She began her career as an engineer at Siemens and NTT Communications.

Debian Family

• Parrot OS 5.0 has been released with the version name Electro Ara, with major upliftments such as added support for IoT devices, which means you can now run ParrotOS on IoT hardware along with a Raspberry Pi without any desktop environments and install what you like. Currently, they recommend you use a Raspberry Pi 4 to install Parrot OS 5.0 for the best use.

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

• Feren OS 2022.03 comes almost six months after the previous ISO snapshot, Feren OS 2021.10, and it’s the first ISO release of the Ubuntu-based distribution to ship with the latest and greatest KDE Plasma 5.24 LTS desktop environment series.

• KDE Plasma 5.24.3 is included by default in this updated media, alongside the KDE Frameworks 5.92 and KDE Applications 21.12.3 software suites, all of them compiled against the Qt 5.15.3 open-source application framework. With this, the Applications Menu and Feren OS Clock have been rebased on the Plasma 5.24 code.

Devices/Embedded

• Social networks spread everywhere, covering everyone’s life. But they are owned by companies, so you can be concerned about your privacy. With OpenSource Social Network (OSSN) you can create your own private one with a Raspberry PI and keep your data ownership.

• In this tutorial, I’m going to show you how to install OpenSource Social Network in a Raspberry PI.

• Social Networks revolutionized people’s lives in the last few years. Everyone uses its social channels every day to stay connected with friends and family. But a common question regards the privacy and data security, which are shared with all world. Even if Social Networks created complex privacy policies to protect users, maintaining your data in your server is always the best option if you don’t want to make them available to the public.

Open Hardware/Modding

• Pinball machines are large, complex, and heavy boxes of joy and delight. However, when you don’t have the money or space for one, you have to make your own mini Raspberry Pi-powered one.

• Just because a microcontroller doesn’t have a dedicated video peripheral doesn’t mean it cannot output a video signal. This is demonstrated once again, this time on the ESP32 by [aquaticus] with a library that generates PAL/SECAM and NTSC composite signals. As a finishing touch on the hardware side, [aqaticus] added an RCA jack is an optional extra. The composite signal itself is generated on GPIO 25, with the selection from a wide number of PAL and NTSC resolutions.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

• Another step forward for the mobile Lagrange: the first Android integrations have been done in the form of native text input, device status/navigation bar theming, and scroll behavior. According to my Alpha/Beta nomenclature, this ends the Alpha phase.

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• Linux has matured into an excellent platform for artists, photographers, animators, and designers. With inexpensive hardware, free software, and a modicum of talent and inspiration, anyone can create professional-looking computer graphics.

• There is a huge range of open source software available to create, modify and convert 2D and 3D computer graphics. In the field of 2D animation, Linux is endowed with a good range of open source software.

Programming/Development

Perl/Raku

• This is nice and simple and allows B to call private methods on A. Sadly, that only works if A and B reside in the same file because a forward declaration will cause a compile time error, unless we define the declared type in the same compilation unit.

• Method resolution is a runtime creature in Raku. By carefully looking at the code, we can learn where Rakudo stores what we need to cheat with.

Leftovers

Hardware

• Grounding of electrical systems is an often forgotten yet important design consideration. Issues with proper grounding can be complicated, confusing, and downright frustrating to solve. So much so that engineers can spend their entire careers specializing in grounding and bonding. [Bsilvereagle] was running into just this sort of frustrating problem while attempting to send audio from a Nintendo Switch into a PC, and documented some of the ways he attempted to fix a common problem known as a ground loop.

• We’ve all had to shake jars of nail polish, model paint, or cell cultures. Mixing paint is easy – but bacteria and cells need to be agitated for hours.  Happily, laboratory tube tumblers automate this for us. The swishing action is handled with rotation. The vials are mounted at angles around a wheel. The angular offset means the tubes are inclined as they rise, and declined as they fall. This causes the liquid in the tube to slosh from one side to the other as the wheel rotates.  [Sebastian S. Cocioba] aka [ATinyGreenCell] released his plans through Tinkercad and GitHub, and with a name like Sir Tumbalot, we know he must be cultured indeed.

• Thanks to its innovative gameplay and quirky humor, Portal became an instant hit when it was released in 2007. Characters became cultural icons, quotes became memes and the game became a classic along with its 2011 sequel. Even today, more than a decade later, we regularly see hackers applying their skills in recreating some of the game’s elements. One beautiful example is [Joran de Raaff]’s physical rendition of a Portal Turret.

• If you own a CNC and have kept tabs on metal prices these past few years (honestly months), you might shed a small tear as you watch chips fly off your work and into the trash. With a sigh, these flecks and pieces are consigned to be the cost of machining a part. Thankfully, the fine folks at [ActionBox] have been working on a 3d printed plaster forge for recycling their metal scraps.

Integrity/Availability

Proprietary

• Despite meeting for almost an entire day, the SEC put off a decision on whether it would act against the software behemoth. And at the beginning of March 2022, Yasser’s lawyer was told that the case was being closed as the SEC had no funds to conduct the interviews needed and to find documentation outside the US due to the COVID=-19 pandemic.

• In his post, Yasser said he had joined Microsoft in 1998 and helped sell the company’s products over the next two decades and was successful in his endeavours, being promoted a number of times.

Security

Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt/Fear-mongering/Dramatisation

• The Hive ransomware operation has converted their VMware ESXi Linux encryptor to the Rust programming language and added new features to make it harder for security researchers to snoop on victim’s ransom negotiations.

Privacy/Surveillance

• Beneath the surface web which you’re reading right now, there are many .onion websites that remain invisible to Google and other search engines. Whether you categorize them as “deep” or “dark” web, these sites significantly enhance your browsing capabilities.

Defence/Aggression

• Often, after the demise of political figures, their troubling histories are whitewashed in the name of respecting their memories and the feelings of their families. The passing of former United States Secretary of State Madeleine Albright on Wednesday has been no exception.

• Russia’s invasion of Ukraine turns ever more dire and atrocious by the day.

• Concerns from hundreds of military families living on the Joint Naval Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam in Hawai’i about foul-smelling drinking water were dismissed on November 29th, 2021, by Naval Commander Captain Erik Spitzer, who assured residents the water was safe to drink. Spitzer declared that he and his staff were drinking the water, so surely reports of a gasoline-like odor, cramps, and vomiting were nothing to worry about. Then, less than a week later, on December 5th, Spitzer took to Facebook to issue an apology.

• So let’s recap what these new documents tell us. They tell us that one of the men who helped two of the September 11 hijackers settle in the United States as they prepared to carry out their attack was in fact a spy for the Saudi government — a government long accused of supporting and financing fundamentalist extremists and the country where the vast majority of the hijackers came from. That spy was paid by and reported directly to the longtime Saudi ambassador to the United States, a close and long-standing family friend of the US president.

• This should, realistically, prompt many questions, like: If al-Bayoumi had advance knowledge of the attack, did Bandar bin Sultan know, too? Did the latter raise the alarm with anyone in the United States, like his close friend the president? Was Bin Sultan aware of al-Bayoumi’s assistance to the hijackers? Did Bush’s relationship with Bin Sultan cloud his judgement and explain his indifferent response to the intelligence warnings that came to his desk? What did the two talk about on September 13, and why has the Saudi government faced absolutely no accountability over the years?

• Lyudmyla Denisova, Ukraine’s ombudsperson, said 402,000 people, including 84,000 children, have been taken against their will.

• EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: Twenty years ago last week, IBM and the Holocaust, exposed—backed up by a tower of documentation— that IBM knowingly organized all six phases of the Holocaust: identification, exclusion, confiscation, ghettoization, deportation, and even extermination. All of this occurred under the micromanagement of IBM’s celebrated CEO, Thomas Watson, Sr., operating from his New York office on Madison Avenue, and later through European subsidiaries. In view of what IBM was able to accomplish on behalf of the Nazis prior to the era of the computer, the thought of what big tech can now do to surveil, censor, and control human lives is sobering indeed.

• What’s more, Bentouati’s possible targets were, according to the verdict of February 23 convicting him of jihadist activities, the Eiffel Tower or the Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris. Also Barajas airport (Madrid) or Salamanca Cathedral. “There is a video of his desire to reclaim ‘the great castle of Salamanca’,” explains the Audiencia Nacional ruling, stressing that photographs of these “places” were seized, in which he can be seen “marking them with the mark of Daech [acronym for Islamic State in Arabic]”. A ring with this stamp later found in his house: “Which replicates the seal of the Prophet used by Daech both individually and for the insignia of his flag”. On the inside it says: “Muhammad, Messenger, Allah”.

Environment

• The collapse, captured by satellite images, marked the first time in human history that the frigid region had an ice shelf collapse. It happened at the beginning of a freakish warm spell last week when temperatures soared more than 70 degrees (40 Celsius) warmer than normal in some spots of East Antarctica. Satellite photos show the area had been shrinking rapidly the last couple of years, and now scientists wonder if they have been overestimating East Antarctica’s stability and resistance to global warming that has been melting ice rapidly on the smaller western side and the vulnerable peninsula.

• A burst occurred for an unknown reason in a pipe leading to a tailings dam of a nickel mine in Manisa, western Turkey. The liquid in the pipe caused the soil in nearby areas to turn white and began to flow into a nearby stream.

• Ahmet Vehbi Bakırlıoğlu, a Manisa MP of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), visited the site and talked to locals and officials from the Meta Nikel Kobalt company, which operates the mine.

• President Joe Biden, at the end of his impassioned address in Warsaw, said…

• One million US deaths from COVID-19. Catatonic politics on climate change. Communities suffocating from environmental injustice. All these issues are tragically linked by the hardening divisions in the United States over our acceptance or rejection of expertise in science, public health, and environmental protection.

• Climate change is sad. It’s frightening. It’s demoralizing. Even knowing that countless solutions are available, with more emerging daily, can cause despair because of the petty pace at which we’re embracing them.

Energy

• In 2022, it’s possible to get solar panels designed to power your home, take camping, or replace the power adapter you use to charge your phone or other small electronics. Investing in solar panels is not only a way to reduce your carbon footprint, but using them can actually save you money. By taking part of your energy use “off the grid,” solar panels can lower your monthly utility bill. Here’s how you can integrate eco-friendly technology into your life.

Finance

• In over twenty hours of grueling confirmation hearings for Judge Ketanji Jackson’s nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court, Republican Senators (Cruz, Cotton, Hawley, Blackburn, and Graham) found much time to disgrace themselves, using the Judge as a prop for their despicable political ambitions. Meanwhile the Democratic (and Republican) Senators found no time to tap into Judge Jackson’s knowledge and analysis of the grave issues regarding the nexus of the power of giant corporations and the Constitution.

• Economic experts and progressives opposed to the outrageous levels of inequality in the United States celebrated Saturday evening and into Sunday after reporting revealed that President Joe Biden plans to unveil “a 20 percent minimum tax rate on all American households worth more than $100 million”—a so-called “Billionaire’s Tax” that will specifically target approximately 700 of the nation’s wealthiest people.

• “This minimum tax would make sure that the wealthiest Americans no longer pay a tax rate lower than teachers and firefighters.”

• Language is at the heart of human intelligence. It therefore is and must be at the heart of our efforts to build artificial intelligence. No sophisticated AI can exist without mastery of language.

• The field of language AI—also referred to as natural language processing, or NLP—has undergone breathtaking, unprecedented advances over the past few years. Two related technology breakthroughs have driven this remarkable recent progress: self-supervised learning and a powerful new deep learning architecture known as the transformer.

• We now stand at an exhilarating inflection point. Next-generation language AI is poised to make the leap from academic research to widespread real-world adoption, generating many billions of dollars of value and transforming entire industries in the years ahead.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Last year, a bookshop chain has been fined 250,000 forints for selling an LGBTQ book, a children’s story depicting a day in the life of a child with same-sex parents.

• Following the penalty, the company went to court, and the Budapest District Court has ruled that the punishment was unlawful.

• I went to jail in order to expose the fact that Alex Salmond was being framed on false charges, orchestrated within the Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon’s office and testified to by perjury committed by individuals very close to Sturgeon, who made fake claims of molestation. They were seen right through by a largely female jury. But the details of the defence case were reported by nobody but me, (I was jailed for it). The mainstream media, led by the BBC, conducted in unison a campaign to portray Salmond as guilty and the verdict as perverse, by presenting to the public only the prosecution case.

• The State Security Department says that to prevent foreign intelligence infiltration, Russian and Belarusian nationals are issued visas only in exceptional cases and in consultations with Lithuania’s intelligence.

• However, the department’s former head Gediminas Grina cautions that checking people’s backgrounds is difficult, especially when they come in large numbers.

• In other words, media that speak facts are to be censored. If you look at current statistics on crime, welfare and underachievement, you immediately notice: Africans and Muslims are disproportionately involved. In Austria, more than 40 percent of crimes are committed by migrants. Almost 50 percent of the prison inmates in Austria are foreigners. This means that the proportion of foreigners is significantly higher than that in the population as a whole. The citizen is confronted with an increasingly brutal and frequent crime committed by foreigners. When reporting, the established media often conceal the origin of the criminals and lull the population into a deceptive sense of security.

• Landmark EU rules targeting Google, Amazon, Apple, Meta and Microsoft are likely to set a global benchmark and may even force changes in the tech giants’ business models, lawyers and experts said.

• Europe’s antitrust chief Margrethe Vestager won backing on Thursday from European Union members and EU lawmakers for her proposal, the Digital Markets Act (DMA), to rein in the powers of the tech giants via legislation for the first time, rather than lengthy antitrust investigations.

Censorship/Free Speech

• Although exceedingly rare, some public libraries in Utah have also noticed an increase in book challenges — requests to have books pulled or moved to different sections in the library. Librarian Wanda Mae Huffaker is in charge of the Salt Lake County Library’s committee that oversees reconsideration requests and was previously the chairwoman for Intellectual Freedom Roundtable.

• Alec Muffet, an ex-Facebook developer who is responsible for writing code that has enabled major websites such as Facebook, BBC and most recently Twitter to build a presence on the dark web, told i: “I am observing more organisations, over time, seeing value in offering alternative websites which have more integrity, privacy and censorship-resistance, so that they can reach their audiences.

• The film was originally classified as R16, but now only those aged 18 and over will be allowed to see it.

• The Kashmir Files is a 2022 Indian-Hindi language drama film, and is a fictional account of the exodus of Hindu people during the Kashmir Insurgency in 1990.

• Pandits were targeted by Islamists backed by Pakistan during a cataclysmic surge in violence in the 1990s. Police protection was scant. All but a few fled, never to return. Official reports and scholarly research suggest that more than 200 were murdered, among the 14,000 civilians, 5,000 Indian soldiers and 22,000 militants killed during the past three decades of strife in the valley.

• Since the Taliban’s blitz takeover of Afghanistan six months ago, the songs have gone silent in the historic musicians’ quarter of Kabul. Gone are the instruments that once filled shop windows in the alleys of Kucha-e-Kharabat. Their owners packed them and left, putting a centuries-old Afghan musical heritage at risk of vanishing.

• Many are being driven out, as work has dried up both because of the country’s economic collapse and out of fear of the Taliban. The Taliban government has not formally banned music, but musicians say individual Taliban fighters take matters into their own hands and target them, halting performances and breaking their instruments because they say music is “haram,” or proscribed by Islamic law.

Freedom of Information/Freedom of the Press

• During his career spanning over half a century, Engin worked for and managed several newspapers and magazines. He was sent behind bars seven times. He lived in exile for 12 years after the 1980 coup.

• Ever since the start of the war in Ukraine, the Russian armed forces have been bullying and threatening journalists and local media in the conquered territories to prevent them reporting the facts and get them to spread Kremlin propaganda. Reporters Without Borders (RSF) condemns these acts of intimidation, which include abduction, and calls on the Russian authorities to stop harassing Ukrainian journalists.

Civil Rights/Policing

• The Fulani herders are predominantly Muslim, and extremist herdsmen frequently launch violent attacks against Christian farmers in Nigeria.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• When I was working at AWS, around 2017 we started getting excited pitches from companies who wanted to be part of the 5G build-out, saying that obviously there’d be lots of opportunities for public-cloud providers. But I never walked away convinced. Either I didn’t believe the supposed customers really needed what 5G offered, or I didn’t believe the opportunity was anywhere near big enough to justify the trillion-dollar build-out investment. Six years later, I still don’t. This is a report on a little online survey I ran, looking for actual real-world 5G impact to see if I was wrong.

Monopolies

Copyrights

• In the first six months of 2021, YouTube processed four million automated Content ID claims every day but sometimes the involvement of a human being is the only way to tackle copyright disputes. To this end, YouTube is now seeking a Copyright Operations Specialist who will be required to deal with ‘escalated’ takedown requests, including those from ‘sensitive entities’.

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