● 04.18.22

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 18/04/2022: GNU Parted 3.5 and Git 2.36

Posted in News Roundup at 7:20 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxDistributionsDevices/EmbeddedFree Software/Open SourceLeftovers

GNU/Linux

Desktop/Laptop

• The Byte Mk I is an AMD-powered mini Linux PC with Coreboot support and plenty of power.

• Star Labs has been known as a manufacturer of Linux laptops for some time. Recently, however, the company has dipped its toes into the mini PC market and its first release is impressive on paper.

• The Byte MK I is a first-gen mini PC equipped with an AMD Ryzen 7 5800 Octo-Core CPU (up to a 4.4GHz clock speed), AMD Radeon graphics, and up to 64GB of 3200MHz RAM and up to 6TB SSD storage.

• When I first started using Linux (back in ’97), it was a challenge to not only install but to use. It seemed everything I needed to do required I read a considerably long manifesto as to why it had to be done a certain way, while at the same time offering a number of different ways to achieve the same thing. It was both confusing and freeing at the same time. Being thrown into that mix head-first forced me to learn fast. After about six months of using Linux as my only OS, I pretty much had it down.

• But six months is a long time to take just so you know how to use an operating system on a computer.

• Fortunately, things have dramatically changed. Linux of yesterday would barely be recognizable, in comparison to its modern equivalent. Believe me when I tell you…that’s a good thing. Not that I didn’t enjoy those early days with Linux. I did. It was a blast learning something new and feeling like what you were getting started with was something special. Nowadays, Linux is second nature to me and no longer feels like it’s relegated to the basements of computer science buildings on university campuses across the world.

• Now, Linux is as user-friendly as any OS on the market. If you’re considering migrating from either Windows or macOS to Linux, here are some things you need to know.

• Do you still use an older or unsupported Ubuntu on your computer? Don’t want to upgrade for some reason? Then, you might want to update or install some new applications but you find it impossible. Good news for you! There are several solutions to fulfill these needs, which are, by making use of Flatpaks, AppImages and Snaps (let’s call them FAIS for easier naming). Let’s see how FAIS help us to run latest versions of LibreOffice, OnlyOffice, FreeCAD, Nextcloud Server some games and many more on Xenial Xerus (16.04 LTS) as the following. We deliberately chose Xenial so you can be sure that running them on newer Ubuntu will work.

Audiocasts/Shows

• Arch Linux isn’t a bleeding edge distro, Gentoo isn’t a bleeding edge distro and neither is Void or almost any linux distro because that would be a terrible experience that almost nobody would really want to use.

• Our discoveries including a better diff, a way to replace Snaps with Flatpacks, a command line cheat sheet, help with YAML, and signing PDFs. Plus your feedback about supporting us with crypto nonsense, running Linux on work machines, an esoteric browser, and more.

• Hello and welcome to the 463rd installment of Linux in the Ham Shack. In this short-topics episode, the hosts discuss employment opportunities with the ARRL, an Erie ham radio operator with bad intentions, Ham Radio Village at DEFCON 30, updates to the Raspberry Pi OS install images, the rmlint utility and much more. Thanks for listening and have a great week.

Kernel Space

• Linux Kernel is the main component of the Linux operating system as well as the core interface between a system’s hardware and its processes. Since 2015, the Linux kernel has supported UEFI mirrored memory functionality of x86/x86-64.

• In the latest edition, Huawei engineers developed and added the UEFI mirror memory function Linux AArch 64. Recently, Huawei engineer Wupeng Ma released the latest patches working on this UEFI mirror memory support for Linux AArch64 hardware.

Instructionals/Technical

• With the growing number of espionage scandals in recent years and the prevalence of online tracking, protecting your privacy online has never been more important. Virtually everything we do online is tracked these days, whether for profit or to obtain information to sell to third parties, which has led to the development of tools like the Tor Browser to help us navigate the Internet safely and strengthen our privacy online.

• Pacman is the default package manager on Arch-based distros. Here’s how you can use it to manage packages on your system like a pro.

• Package managers are the backbone of a Linux system. It’s only because of them you can install and enjoy the latest software on your desktop. Pacman, a portmanteau of the words “package” and “manager,” is the default package manager on Arch-based systems.

• Although Pacman is fairly easy to learn as compared to its counterparts, users coming from other distro families find it frustrating to adapt to the short, one-character arguments of Pacman. So let’s take a look at Pacman, its various options, and how you can use it to manage packages on Arch Linux like a pro.

• Tutorial to install Tixati open source Torrent Client on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy JellyFish to access the BitTorrent network for downloading needed files.

• Tixati is a compact BitTorrent Client for Windows and Linux operating systems. It has been developed while keeping in mind that it won’t put much load on your system while downloading the files. To use it, the users can easily download torrent files, which then instruct the appropriate program on how to download them. These files, which are only a few kilobytes in size, only contain metadata that describes the download process. Tixati can be fed with these files and then starts downloading the requested content on its own.

• Learn the commands to install FrostWire on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy JellyFish, a free open-source alternative to the discontinued LimeWire.

• To download the files from the networks such as Gnutella and BitTorrent, we require a client application on our system such as FrostWire. It is a free application that allows users to access peer-to-peer torrent networks to download content from sources.

• In this video, we are looking at how to install Viber on Debian 11.

• Today we are looking at how to install Sonic Robo Blast 2 with the Jeck Jims 3D models on a Chromebook. Please follow the video/audio guide as a tutorial where we explain the process step by step and use the commands below.

• In this video, I am going to show how to install Kubuntu 22.04 LTS.

• You’ve probably heard of the “grep” command, but did you know about ripgrep? ripgrep is a “line-oriented search tool” that you can use to quickly find text within files, with additional features.

• The Slack desktop app isn’t available on Chrome OS, and the Android app isn’t supported either. However, there is a workaround available.

• Why do Debian-based Linux distributions have apt as well as apt-get? Did apt replace apt-get or do they have different purposes? We explain the relationship between these two commands.

• [...]

• This is no small undertaking. Even putting the software engineering to one side, hosting the software repositories takes time, effort, and expense. That’s one of the reasons so many “new” Linux distributions are derivations of an existing Linux distribution.

• This leads to families or genealogies of Linux distributions, such as the Debian-based distributions, the Red Hat-based distributions, the Arch-based distributions, and so on.

• The Debian family of distributions—including Ubuntu and all the Ubuntu-derived distributions—uses the Debian Package Manager. This uses package files with the “.deb” file extension, referred to as DEB files. DEB files are compressed files containing other archive files. The archive files contain the application’s executable files, man pages, libraries, and so on.

• This tutorial is about installing and switching between different Python versions on Ubuntu 20.04.

• Using multiple Python versions on your server is a very good choice especially when you have multiple Python applications and you need to test them one by one. Of course, every Python application can run on a different Python version depending on the developer’s choice. It is recommended for the developers or system administrators to use virtual environments for every newly deployed Python application. This is the main purpose of the tutorial, to have multiple Python versions on a single system and have choices before creating the virtual environments or changing the default Python version.

• In the next steps, first we are going to install the default Python version in Ubuntu 20.04, and then lower Python versions. Once we install multiple Python versions, we are going to explain the process of switching them.

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Anaconda on AlmaLinux 8. For those of you who didn’t know, Anaconda is an open-source package manager and distribution of Python. It is designed for machine learning and data science and comprises several open-source packages. Anaconda can be installed on all popular operating systems including Windows, Linux, and macOS.

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

• Pacman is a powerful package manager that ships as the default on Arch-based distros, but it lacks the functionality of downloading packages from the Arch User Repository (AUR). The AUR is a community-maintained repository providing thousands of third-party packages in the form of installation scripts, also known as PKGBUILDs.

• To install packages using these PKGBUILDs, we require an AUR helper like yay. yay doesn’t come preinstalled on Arch Linux and isn’t available in the official Arch repositories either. So how do you install yay to download packages from the AUR on your Arch desktop? Let’s find out.

• Anytime you’re planning to do a lot of calculations on a Linux system, you can use the power of bash to create a quick function and then use it repeatedly to do the calculations for you. In this post, we’ll look at how this trick works and what you need to be aware of to ensure that your calculations are correct.

Games

• Valve continue to cook up plans for more exciting upgrades to the Steam Deck, with Refresh Rate Switching looking like it’s on the way. Not ready quite yet with work to do but the idea is great.

• Even more supporting evidence towards the Steam Deck being a nice success for Valve, with SteamDB reporting that the Steam Deck was the #1 top seller last week.

• Their list goes by revenue, so it’s not a huge surprise considering the price of the Steam Deck, however it’s going up against the likes of Elden Ring which has sold over ten million copies (and lots of those were on PC), as The Verge reported. Not only that though, it’s also fighting the Valve Index, which is in the top 10 for last week as well and costs quite a bit more — so it really is a show of early strength for Valve’s newest hardware.

• Bottles continues to mature as a way to manage installing applications and games with the compatibility layer Wine. A fresh release is out now showing off some UI improvements and new features.

• Version 2022.4.14 adds in a new loading screen, as the startup can take a few seconds so it’s just a nice bit of initial polishing for the user experience. Another experimental feature also made its way in with the new Library Mode view. The idea with this Library, is to pull together your various programs into one place for easy launching…

• Back in January was the change pushed into SDL2 Git where the library prefers Wayland by default where available rather than defaulting to using X11 support. However, pushed today into SDL2 is a revert on that earlier change due to Wayland issues that the developers are more comfortable sticking to X11/XWayland by default until various Wayland problems are addressed.

Distributions

•  Artix Linux is a fast and easy to use Arch Linux-based distribution. It started as a version of Arch Linux without SystemD around 2017. Since then, it has grown to be a distribution that aims to create an Arch Linux environment that promotes package simplicity and security.

• One of the main selling points of Artix is that it maintains a version of Arch Linux without SystemD. Similar to Devuan, this means that Artix does not include software and kernel configurations that are associated with the SystemD init system. This, in turn, reduces the amount of programs that you install and run in your computer.

• Another selling point for Artix is that it treats alternative init systems as first-class citizens. This means that, unlike Arch, Artix provides you with the choice of picking the init system that you want for your computer.

SUSE/OpenSUSE

• SUSE-IT plans a replacement of some network equipment in the Nuremberg Datacenter next Thursday (2022-04-21), between 4PM to 5PM CEST. Actual downtime is planned to be up to 15 minutes.

Debian Family

• On Monday, Linux Mint announced that it has released a beta version of a new Linux Mint Debian Edition upgrade tool that can be used to upgrade LMDE 4 to LMDE 5. The tool is available through the Mint repository by running apt install mintupgrade after refreshing your cache (apt update).

• The blog announcing the availability says that the tool ships with a graphical user interface, but is launched from the command line by running sudo mintupgrade. After running the software and successfully upgrading your system, remove the tool and reboot your computer by running apt remove mintupgrade followed by sudo reboot.

• Details about Linux Mint Upgrade Utility (mintupgrade), its feature and how to install and try.

• A talented IT professional like Kaplan is probably not expected to put on a uniform and carry a gun. During the periods when he is unavailable it is more likely that professionals like Kaplan are asked to assist with signals intelligence and cyber war.

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

• Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue 731 for the week of April 10 – 16, 2022.

Devices/Embedded

Open Hardware/Modding

• Before standardized video cards came along, computer and video game console designers utilized video chips. Those simplified the design process and offloaded much of the work from the processor. Those video chips had hardcoded graphical building blocks and handled video generation. One of the most popular was the Texas Instruments TMS9918 used in the ColecoVision, TI-99/4, and MSX computers. This write-up from Doctor Volt will walk you through how to use an Arduino Nano to output graphics from the TMS9918.

• You can follow this tutorial with just a breadboard, a TMS9918 VDP (video display processor), and a handful of compatible DRAM (or SRAM with D-flops) chips. The Arduino board acts as the rest of the computer in this setup. If you wanted to create a video game console, for example, the Nano would handle all the game’s logic. It would then tell the TMS9918 what graphics to display on the screen. The Nano controls the TMS9918 video the RAM chips, where it writes bytes that describe the onscreen content.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• Richard Stallman launched the free-software movement 35 years ago to ensure that users have the freedom to (1) run, (2) edit, (3) contribute to, and (4) share software. According to lore, in his frustration with a bug in some printer software, he conceived of these four principles of software freedom. The Free Software Foundation has supported and promoted these principles through the invention of licenses (e.g., the General Public License), the development of software, (e.g., emacs and the Gnome desktop), and evangelism through conferences, publications, and seminars.

• Perhaps the place where open-source software most directly touches the public is in the realm of the World Wide Web. Tim Berners-Lee, its inventor, convinced his management at CERN to let him release his protocol under a free-software license (previous protocols were proprietary), and Marc Andreessen released the first graphical web browser, Mosaic, under a free-software license. Mosaic incorporated a feature, “view source,” that let any user see the source code of the page they were viewing, bringing an unprecedented level of transparency to computing and leading to the rapid adoption of Web 1.0.

• Because contributions to free-software projects are by definition unrestricted, it is not surprising that a decentralized, global community of developers have fueled its growth. The distributed nature of this community exposed the need for tools for distributed software development, which is one reason for the popularity of productivity tools such as “Git.” During the Covid pandemic, the commercial software world adopted the remote collaboration frameworks that have been used by the free-software community for decades.

SaaS/Back End/Databases

• The PGJDBC team is proud to announce release 42.3.4 of the JDBC driver for PostgreSQL

• This release is a maintenance release with some issues resolved details can be found in the changelog

• The team would like to thank all that contributed.

• PostgreSQL Partition Manager (pg_partman) v4.6.1 has been released.

• IMPORTANT REQUEST: A topic has been opened on the github page to discuss the future development of pg_partman and support for trigger-based partitioning. A plan is currently in place to begin dropping trigger-based support upon the EOL for PostgreSQL 10 on November 10, 2022. Feedback is requested for use-cases that could potentially change these plans and continue supporting trigger-based partitioning until native partitioning better supports them.

FSF

GNU Projects

• It’s been ten years today since the very first commit to what was already called Guix—the unimaginative name is a homage to Guile and Nix, which Guix started by blending together. On April 18th, 2012, there was very little to see and no actual “project”. The project formed in the following months and became a collective adventure around a shared vision.

• Ten years later, it’s amazing to see what more than 600 people achieved, with 94K commits, countless hours of translation, system administration, web design work, and no less than 175 blog posts to share our enthusiasm at each major milestone. It’s been quite a ride!

• What follows is a series of personal accounts by some of the contributors who offered their time and energy and made it all possible. Read their stories and perhaps you too will be inspired to join all the nice folks on this journey?

• Over on the blog for the GNU Guix project, which is a “transactional package manager and an advanced distribution of the GNU system that respects user freedom”, the project reflects on its ten-year journey. The post consists of personal accounts from around two dozen contributors about the project, its history, and its community.

• I have released parted v3.5, the only change from the previous alpha was updating gnulib to the current version.

• GNU Parted 3.5 is here to introduce support for the Linux /home GUID using linux-home flag, support for partition names to be an empty string when they are set in –script mode, as well as support for using the swap partition flag on disks labeled as MSDOS.

• GNU Parted 3.5 also adds a new –fix option to the –script mode to automatically fix various problems and adds a –json command-line switch that can be used to output the details of the disk in the JSON file format.

Programming/Development

Rust

• Please welcome Thom Chiovoloni and Chris Denton to the Library Contributors group!

• Thom has been working on various improvements to the implementation of the standard library, such as optimizing io::Error, optimizing Chars::count, and has been helping out with reviewing various implementation changes.

Leftovers

Hardware

• Before COVID, they were a full service shop, but you could buy parts there too, and after COVID, the store outside the shop is empty of retail stuff and they just want to service your car, for twice what the dealer rates are! Again, HOW?

Integrity/Availability

Proprietary

Pseudo-Open Source

Privatisation/Privateering

Linux Foundation

• The enhancement and adoption of SONiC, the open-source network operating system, could accelerate now that its development has been given over to the the Linux Foundation, experts say.

Security

• Unlike penetration tests, vulnerability tests do not consist of performing real attacks. However, they’re no less valuable, as they can spot vulnerabilities missed by a penetration test and provide a baseline for comparison. In addition, vulnerability tests allow IT teams to identify weaknesses before they become an actual problem.

• The goal is not to be stealthy but to assess risks from the inside, like how hackers would deploy their attack after breaking into a network. That’s why vulnerability tests involve both passive and active scans.

• Vulnerability assessment tools usually scan applications for known vulnerabilities. It should be noted that many pentesting solutions also include advanced scanners, so they can be used for vulnerability assessment too. While there are premium products, organizations often leverage the benefits of robust open-source technologies to save money.

• Some of the tools we’ll see in this top 10 list are bundled in Kali Linux, a super-charged security distribution that can run both pentests and vulnerability tests. Kali Linux can save a lot of time and remove the hassle of installing each tool separately.

• SingCERT’s Security Bulletin summarises the list of vulnerabilities collated from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)’s National Vulnerability Database (NVD) in the past week.

• CISA, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and the U.S. Treasury Department have released a joint Cybersecurity Advisory (CSA) that details cyber threats associated with cryptocurrency thefts and tactics used by a North Korean state-sponsored advanced persistent threat (APT) actor known as the Lazarus Group.

• This release contains bug fixes to improve robustness and some additional configuration support. This release note describes what’s different between Istio 1.13.2 and 1.13.3.

• “The Sandworm attackers made an attempt to deploy the Industroyer2 malware against high-voltage electrical substations in Ukraine,” ESET explained. “In addition to Industroyer2, Sandworm used several destructive malware families including CaddyWiper, OrcShred, SoloShred, and AwfulShred.”

Privacy/Surveillance

• In order to audit the privacy and security practices of the apps we use on a daily basis, we need to be able to inspect the network traffic they are sending. An app asking for permission to your location may only use it to send it to your friends, or it may be tracking your every move. Without knowing exactly what traffic is being sent, you’d never know. Traditionally, this has been the job of dynamic analysis – running the app and capturing traffic as the user interacts with it. A typical setup might involve a test device where the app runs, connected to a wireless access point running mitmproxy, Burp Suite or something similarly tasked with recording traffic. An additional control laptop might be added to the mix, which is connected to the test device via USB, to run adb commands on the device or overload Java methods using the dynamic instrumentation toolkit Frida. HTTPS traffic can be intercepted in this way by overloading the app calls to Java’s TrustManager and providing our own, which accepts the proxy certificates that we provide. In combination, this device schema provides a powerful setup to analyze traffic in a stationary, controlled setting.

• But what if we don’t have the luxury of a testing lab? What if the app behavior changes based on your location, or interaction with the outside world? For instance, if you use an app to rent a car or unlock a door to a shared workplace, the real-time behavior of the app will be different from what you can replicate in a lab. For these kinds of complex interactions, a roaming Machine-in-the-Middle (MitM) schema is needed. In fact, all three components of the previous schema (test device, interceptor, and control device) will need to be consolidated into a single device running the software required for all three components. If the app being audited is a form of disciplinary technology – that is, a surveillance app that one person installs on the device of another person – then the auditor will also need to surreptitiously capture traffic being sent by the app, which may pose additional testing complications.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• They’re sowing disruption and disinformation, and they have their eyes on 2024.

Monopolies

Patents

Software Patents

• On April 15, 2022, the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) instituted trial on all challenged claims in an IPR filed by Unified against U.S. Patent 9,678,774, owned and asserted by Invincible IP LLC, an IP Edge entity. The ’774 patent relates to allowing or denying migration of virtual machines based on the geographic location of the target host. It has been asserted against Citrix Systems, Nutanix, Alibaba Cloud US, DigitalOcean, NetApp, and Skytap in the District of Delaware.

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