● 04.19.22

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 19/04/2022: Debian’s Latest Firmware Debate; RIP, Pedro Francisco (MasGNULinux)

Posted in News Roundup at 10:43 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxDistributionsDevices/EmbeddedFree Software/Open SourceLeftovers

GNU/Linux

• LFNW hasn’t been in person since the start of the pandemic. I don’t think it was even held in 2020. Anyhoo, they played it safe for 2022… and put in a bit of effort with planning what will hopefully be a very successful virtual event for 2022… this weekend.

Desktop/Laptop

• One secondary school, 1500+ students, 350 Desktop PCs, GNU/Linux and a whole load of Free and Open Source Software… That’s right, you read that correctly!

• These are very sad days for the Free Software and Social Justice movements. Our beloved friend Pedro Francisco has passed away. Pedro fought relentlessly for equity in our society. He was also a Free/Libre Software activist. Pedro created and managed MasGNULinux, a Spanish blog with news about Free Software and GNU/Linux. MasGNULinux was the best reference in the latest Free Software projects for the Spanish speaking community. Thank you for your integrity, your honesty and your dedication to make this world a better place for this and future generations. Pedro’s legacy will live on forever, in every line of code of each Free Software project.

• Luis Falcon brings the sad news that Pedro Francisco has passed on. “Pedro created and managed MasGNULinux, a Spanish blog with news about Free Software and GNU/Linux. MasGNULinux was the best reference in the latest Free Software projects for the Spanish speaking community.”

• Microsoft has done some terrible things with Windows and many people consider it a dangerous operating system. A lot of viruses and spyware exist on it. A virus is an infectious program that can damage your computer without your permission.

• It doesn’t matter what type of file you are working on, a virus can infect your computer and delete your files. Spyware is adware that monitors your internet activities. If you are not careful about what you download from the internet, you may end up downloading a spyware virus. This virus will monitor your internet activities and collect personal information about you. It is very important that you keep your software up to date. This way, you will be able to protect your computer from viruses and spyware.

• Another reason why you should switch from Windows to Linux is that Linux is free. You don’t have to pay anything to use Linux. There is no advertising or spyware with Linux. You can customize Linux to suit your needs. If you are not happy with the default programs, you can easily install different programs that you want to use. If you want to save your money, Linux is the way to go. It is really simple to use, and it won’t cost you a dime.

Server

• In this blog, we will be introducing where and how clusters are currently being deployed, what these deployment methods enable, and the major players in that space.

• This blog is a part of a series of blogs on HPC where we will introduce you to the world of HPC.

Audiocasts/Shows

• This week’s episode of Destination Linux, we’re going to talk about what makes a Linux distro good for beginners. Then we’re going to talk about EndeavourOS’s latest release. Plus we’ve also got our famous tips, tricks and software picks. All of this and so much more this week on Destination Linux. So whether you’re brand new to Linux and open source or a guru of sudo. This is the podcast for you.

• The Ubuntu 22.04 release carries a colossal crop of cumulative changes and improvements added in the previous three releases — but what are the most notable?

• That’s the question I answer in my Ubuntu 22.04: What’s New video.

• Yes, I’m back with a breathy, bi-annual bulldoze through the biggest and best embellishments on offer.

• As Jammy is a long-term support release — fun fact: > 90% of all Ubuntu users use an LTS release — there’s a lot to cover with features carried over from 20.10, 21.04, and 21.10, plus the newly new stuff that debuts in 22.04!

Applications

• 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.

• Even if you are not interested in using the terminal, the Linux terminal often makes some of the heavy lifting more effortless and lets you fix stuff. So, is safe to say that the Linux terminal is pretty powerful if you know what you’re doing.

• And that is true! But the problem appears when you get an error. If you don’t have enough experience using it, you won’t know how to solve it.

• While the error messages try to convey the best meaning of the problem, not every user can easily decode the fix. It usually takes a bit of research for beginners. But, if the error can have more clarity, the user could be able to fix it sooner.

• Not just limited to the error message, the structure of the output you get in your terminal to browse files, for example, is not the prettiest.

• Why need a Linux image scanning application? You might ask. Image scanning is a priceless endeavor for a number of Linux-based projects, especially for users that are after web-based applications.

• Such applications make it easier to not only scan images but also scan printed objects, handwriting, and texts, and afterward convert them to use digital images.

• The simplicity of the Skanlite Linux application makes it possible to effortlessly scan and save your raw images to flexibly usable digital format. By using flatbed scanners, you get more optimization in your image scanning routines.

• The long Easter weekend was a good opportunity to relax and recharge a little, and of course test gemlogging via Lagrange in the terminal.

• [...]

• I’ve got work to do with improving keyboard focus navigation. It’s already much better with menus being keyboard-navigable, but there’s way too much Tabbing and Shift-Tabbing around. I’ll probably apply more cursor-key based navigation between UI elements, but it’ll require being careful so that the normal document navigation isn’t accidentally prevented. The really nice thing about this is that the GUI version will also benefit from the navigation improvements.

• The text editor is passable. It’s using the same input widget as the desktop GUI version, so it can do word wrapping, copy/paste, and undo. However, its current set of keybindings doesn’t really conform to any common conventions. The GUI version has the typical Ctrl+C/V/X/Z, but because I want to keep Ctrl+Z as a way to suspend the app and get back to the shell, I’ve switched the modifier key to Meta, which in practice means Escape or Alt. Having Emacs-style bindings might be a useful option to have, though.

• Word processors are great. They can handle basic composition jobs such as writing letters and essays. However, word processors cannot easily handle documents with custom layouts and graphs.

• This is because word processors such as Microsoft’s Word and Libreoffice’s Writer are not designed for those tasks. As such, this can be incredibly limiting if you want to create documents with unusual formats and symbols.

• Knowing that, one way to get around this problem is by using a flexible document language such as TeX. From there, you can then use a preparation program such as LaTeX to output your TeX file into a printable document.

Instructionals/Technical

• If you’ve ever used any modern Windows 10 laptop with a decent touchpad, or a MacBook, you know how touchpad gestures make using the laptop so much easier. In many ways, they make the touchpad even better than using a Bluetooth mouse. Unfortunately, Linux-based operating systems such as Ubuntu haven’t really caught up in that department. But Ubuntu is still Linux so, if you want something, you can have it with a little effort. Today we’ll see how you can customize Ubuntu touchpad gestures.

• For graphic designers who are just starting out in the industry, paying up thousands of dollars to Adobe for their suite of applications is a monumental task. Fortunately, there are various open-source applications looking to bridge that gap for free. If you’re looking for an alternative to Adobe Illustrator to flex your vector graphic designing skills, you need not worry much. Inkscape is one of the most popular open-source vector graphic designing tools. In this guide, I will walk you through the process of installing it on your Ubuntu 20.04 machine.

• In this guide, we are going through the step by step process of installing Brave browser in Ubuntu 22.04.

• So what is Brave browser?

• Brave is a free and open-source web browser developed by Brave Software, Inc. based on the Chromium web browser, a Google-sponsored free and open-source web browser.. Brave is a privacy-focused browser, which distinguishes itself from other browsers by automatically blocking online advertisements and website trackers in its default settings.

• Brave browser boasts in its site to be 3x faster than Chrome and to stop online surveillance, loads content faster, and uses 35% less battery.

• In our previous article, we have discussed what is ansible inventory and configuration file which lays the foundation to learn ansible. In this article, we are going to discuss ansible ad hoc commands with some examples.

• This guide will show you how to use the wget command through 10 commonly used examples.

• Wget is a command-line utility for downloading files from the web, created by the GNU Project. The name is a combination of “World Wide Web” and “get.”

• Wget allows you to download files using HTTP, HTTPS, and FTP protocols. In addition, it gives you the ability to download multiple files, resume downloads, limit bandwidth, perform recursive downloads, download in the background, mirror a website, and even more.

• By the end of this guide, you’ll know everything there is to know about the wget command and how to use it to download files from the Internet.

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install VSCodium on Manjaro 21. For those of you who didn’t know, VSCodium is a free and open-source fork of Microsoft’s VS code editor. The source code for this product can be found on GitHub, where it is licensed under MIT license and, therefore, will always remain free.

• 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 VSCodium free and open-source fork of Microsoft’s VS code editor on a Manjaro 21.

• In Linux, there are many tools to find and locate files and directories. From previous experience, we have seen some of these tools were very smooth on a large scale, and some of these tools were a bit slower, but they had a great scale to cover on the directory. Earlier, we have seen how to use the fd command and the find command in Linux to find a file. Instead of having the fd or find commands, we can use the locate command on Linux to quickly and efficiently search for a file with specific parameters.

• The main difference between the fd command and the locate command is that the locate command can quickly find files in the directory because it uses a special database for searching the queries.

• In Linux and Unix-based systems, the locate command uses the mlocate, or the merging locate database for searching the entire system. The locate command was first released in 1982 on BSD and GNU machines with the GNU privacy license.

• Further to my post “Why i like mdoc(7) for man pages”[a], i’ve now written a quickstart guide to encourage people to use mdoc(7)[b] when authoring man pages.

• Color scheme is one of the sought after features in many code editors.

• Vim is not behind any modern code editor in terms of features. It provides different built-in color schemes for you. In addition to that, you can also use third party color themes.

• How? Let me show you.

• LibreNMS is an open-source and fully-featured networking monitoring tool that provides a wide range of monitoring features and capabilities for your network devices.

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install ClipGrab on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, ClipGrab is a multi-platform software package for free downloaders and converters for Vimeo, Facebook, and many other popular sites. It is a cross-platform software that runs on Windows, Linux, and Mac.

• 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 ClipGrab downloaders on Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal Fossa). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 18.04, 16.04, and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint.

• Use variables and arguments to change, improve, and reuse your favorite shell scripts.

• Flexibility is an underrated attribute overlooked by many users of the Linux operating system. Being a flexible Linux user implies that you can launch most; if not all, of your user and system applications from the command line interface without having to navigate and search for them from the system GUI applications’ menu.

• Also, the flexibility of your Linux OS user experience not only applies to system-based applications like installed apps but also to non-system-based applications like web apps that require a URL for access.

• The following article assumes you are already familiar with what Etherpad is. If that isn’t the case, then the wikipedia article should suffice for a quick introduction.

• Even though the Etherpad project is well documented, it isn’t always easy to make sense from just documentation. This article aims to condense some of the tutorials available on the project wiki in an easy-to-follow manner.

• It is a common requirement to be able to combine network interfaces into a logical interface to achieve better redundancy and possibly higher throughput. There are two methods to achieve this: NIC Teams and Network Bonding.

• NIC Teams works as a form of load-balancer with failover where you have sort of these two pipes that act as one. So if one of them fails, the other one can still handle the traffic. This way, the end user doesn’t experience any downtime. However, configuring network teams doesn’t really guarantee better network throughput. So, if you configure a team from two 1 GB adapters, youwon’t get a 2 GB throughput.

• Rundeck is a free open-source tool for automation services. It is a very useful piece of software to create simple or complex tasks on a local machine or in a remote machine. So, It comes with many tools like WebAPI, CLI Tools, Web Console in order to run automation tasks. It supports multiple Database Servers like, MariaDB, MySQL , Oracle , PostgrSQL.

• I originally intended to write about how to secure a server/workstation system. However, I changed my mind after realising that there is already this battle-tested tool called lynis that does the auditing for us and also provides us suggestions.

• Lynis is a security auditing tool for Unix-based operating systems. In this article, I am going to inspect my default installation of Debian 11 with lynisand try to secure. Lynis performs an in-depth scan of the system. This includes basic checks like permissions in the filesystem to even performing specific tests of the software and libraries that are installed on a system.

• This way, it only uses and tests the components concerned with the system on which it is scanning. As an example, for a web server it will only include the web-service related tests after doing the general checkup.

• TeamViewer is a global remote connectivity platform that provides secure access to any device globally. It’s used for online meetings and file sharing between computers and remotely controlled instrumentation such as robots or industrial machinery via VPN connections (virtual private networks).

• In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install TeamViewer on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy Jellyfish. The tutorial will import the official repository and gpg key and update and remove the remote desktop software using the command line terminal.

• Python is one of the most popular high-level languages, focusing on high-level and object-oriented applications from simple scrips to complex machine learning algorithms. Python is famous for its simple, easy-to-learn syntax, emphasizes readability, and reduces program maintenance costs and more straightforward conversion to newer releases. Python supports modules and packages, and one of the many is the popular PIP package manager.

• Microsoft Teams is one of the team communication tools that is all the rage these days. It is created by Microsoft and therefore fully supported by them. Today, you will learn how to install Microsoft Teams on openSUSE 15.

• We recently explained how to install Microsoft Teams on Manjaro Linux, and in that post we discussed the utilities of the tool.

• Teams is positioned as a key tool for many teams around the world thanks to its incredible features. We can use it in many circumstances, from planning a family party to real work.

• If you’re a Linux enthusiast like me, there’s no way you can make do with just one distribution on your laptop or p.c. If you’re like me, you run at least one large-capacity SSD device on your laptop, or even a second one installed in a dvd caddy. You’re able to fit 3 to 8 (or more) operating systems on these internal drives, which scratches the distro-hopping itch while challenging you to gain proficiency with multiple package managers, such as apt (Debian/Ubuntu), dnf (Fedora), zypper (OpenSUSE) or pacman (Arch and its derivatives). If you’re a fan of rolling-release distributions like me, you spend a portion of most days running system updates.

• On a multi-boot system, what is the most efficient and safe way to ensure that all your distributions stay updated, requiring the least amount of time and energy? Is a graphical user interface (GUI) the best way to go, or is the command line a better choice?

Games

• If you want to learn to use the Linux terminal, a great way to start is by installing and playing some games. These games aren’t just fun—they also require no compatibility layer or expensive graphics cards.

Distributions

• Flipping from JWM-mode icon-free-desktop and ROX-mode icons-on-desktop, I observed partition icons slightly non-aligned

• I reported about kernels after 5.15.16 having issues, also other kernels dated from 27 January:

• https://bkhome.org/news/202202/kernel-51610-broken.html

• There has been plenty of time for the issues to be fixed, and they are. I compiled 5.15.34 and it runs fine. On my Lenovo Ideacentre PC anyway. Running it now.

New Releases

• With the help of the MX developers Adrian, dolphin_oracle, Stevo, timkb4cq (and in a huge way… fehlix!!) I’m happy to provide an updated AV Linux MX Edition ISO synced with MX 21.1 and as a bonus I’m also debuting the new ‘MXDE’ MX + LXDE build which is new base Operating System with all the performance tweaks of AV Linux in a super lean LXDE/zzzFM formulation. These are not Respins they are built from scratch with the phenomenal antiX/MX ISO build system.

IBM/Red Hat/Fedora

• During the last release, a new authentication option was added to Copr. Now users can also log in using a Kerberos ticket. We use GSSAPI to implement this mechanism. The GSSAPI (Generic Security Services API) is a common interface for accessing the Kerberos security system. Enabling GSSAPI authentication in Copr CLI or API will allow authentication without using the API token for clients that have a Fedora account. To use GSSAPI login in WebUI, click on gssapi-login (negotiate needs to be allowed for the .fedorainfracloud.org domain in the browser, see browser configuration). It will log you in if you have a Kerberos ticket for username@FEDORAPROJECT.ORG. To enable GSSAPI, you need to obtain a Kerberos ticket first. If you want to work with Fedora Copr, you can just do:

• The Fedora Ambassadors and other Fedora folks interested in outreach met for an hour call on Thursday, March 31st. We recorded the call and uploaded the video to YouTube. The upload is left as unlisted as the quality came out less than ideal, but the link can be shared for direct access. We have set up another meeting for Thursday, April 28th at 3 PM UTC.

• We have also put together a new whenisgood to set a permanent time and cadence for the meetings. If you are interested in participating, please fill out the whenisgood form by April 27th.

• Hi, for the past few months I have been working on MacOS build and fixing USB drive restoration on Windows as well as fixing few design bugs. I fixed overflowing highlighted option background in combobox used in Adwaita style on Linux. Next design fix was updating animations when changing pages. Now when we build the new FMW on all platforms, I can say I like MacOS and Linux versions a lot more than Windows version. I don’t like design of buttons. What about your opinion?

• We’re living in unprecedented times. Around the world, we’re experiencing digital and technological transformations in almost every industry – some that we would have considered impossible just a few years ago.

• But with great opportunities come great challenges, and in IT, there’s rarely a day we would describe as easy.

• If you’re involved in digital transformation projects, you know that the path can be rocky and painful: endless meetings, poor leadership, constant changes of scope, cut timelines, slashed budgets, endless testing, and failings, and long working hours all make it tough to maintain your energy and motivation.

Debian Family

• TL;DR: firmware support in Debian sucks, and we need to change this. See the “My preference, and rationale” Section below.

• In my opinion, the way we deal with (non-free) firmware in Debian is a mess, and this is hurting many of our users daily. For a long time we’ve been pretending that supporting and including (non-free) firmware on Debian systems is not necessary. We don’t want to have to provide (non-free) firmware to our users, and in an ideal world we wouldn’t need to. However, it’s very clearly no longer a sensible path when trying to support lots of common current hardware.

• Steve McIntyre argues that Debian needs to rethink its approach to non-free firmware.

• We are very pleased to announce that ITP – Innovation and Training Park Prizren has committed to supporting DebConf22 as a Platinum sponsor. Also, ITP Prizren will host the Conference for all 15 days!

• The ITP Prizren intends to be a changing and boosting element in the area of ICT, agro-food and creatives industries, through the creation and management of a favourable environment and efficient services for SMEs, exploiting different kinds of innovations that can contribute to Kosovo to improve its level of development in industry and research, bringing benefits to the economy and society of the country as a whole.

• ITP Prizren is a focal point in the Balkan region for innovation, business and skills development, and a source of innovative and successful ideas.

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

• This simple tutorial shows how to replace the default Snap Store (Ubuntu Software) with Gnome Software with Flatpak support in Ubuntu 22.04 LTS.

• Many applications today publish Linux packages via Flatpak. However, Ubuntu’s software center (aka Snap Store) does not support this universal package format.

• If you like, Gnome Software can be a good alternative which has both Snap and Flatpak as well as Deb packages support.

Devices/Embedded

• Rockchip RK3588S processor, a cost-down version of Rockchip RK3588 SoC with fewer interfaces, has made its way into Firefly ROC-RK3588S-PC SBC (single board computer) about the size of a credit card and equipped with up to 32GB RAM.

• The compact SBC also comes with up to 128GB eMMC flash, and offers support for NVMe storage, up to four video outputs through HDMI, USB-C and MIPI DSI interfaces, Gigabit Ethernet, USB 3.0, two MIPI CSI camera interfaces, and more.

• The EC90A-GH is a compact sized computer that is designed to function as a secured AI edge computing and IoT platform. According to DFI, the device is very simple to set up and is robust enough to operate 24/7. The company plans to target commercial applications such as kiosks, smart buildings, digital signage and even arcades.

• DFi’s mini PC integrates their own 1.8″ GHF51 board which is based on the AMD Ryzen embedded R1000 series processor. The AMD Ryzen R1000 is a dual multi-threaded core processor( up to 3.5GHz) that features 3 Vega Graphics CUs powerful enough to handle 4K displays. Additionally, the mini PC is equipped with 1x DDR4 2400MHz SODIMM memory onboard (4GB – 8GB)

Open Hardware/Modding

• Priced at €199, the system was created by Arduino working together with UK-based Foundries.io, in similar fashion to other partnerships – it made the recent Nicla Vision with with ST Microelectronics and the Portenta Cat M1/NB IoT GNSS Shield with Thales.

• Basically, Arduino describes the X8 as an industrial-grade System On Module (SOM) that offers the best of two approaches: flexibility of usage of Linux for the heavy lifting of high-performance duties and other processors to run Arduino code for real-time tasks.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

• There is significant commonality between the Tab 11 and Tab 10 as they both use Android 11. The Tab 10 has Blackview’s Doke OS_P 1.0 on top of Android 11, whereas the Tab 11 has Doke OS_P 2.0 which has several additional features (split screen functionality, for example).

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

Programming/Development

• These days, many C++ projects are built using build tools like cmake and meson in addition to GNU make (gmake). In this blog, I have already written on how to compile and run LibreOffice SDK examples using gmake.

• Part of my work on WebKit at Igalia is keeping an eye on performance, especially when it concerns embedded devices. In my experience, there tend to be two types of changes that cause the biggest performance gains – either complete rewrites (e.g. WebRender for Firefox) or tiny, low-hanging fruit that get overlooked because the big picture is so multi-faceted and complex (e.g. making unnecessary buffer copies, removing an errant sleep(5) call). I would say that it’s actually the latter bug that’s harder to diagnose and fix, even though the code produced at the end of it tends to be much smaller. What I’m writing about here falls firmly into the latter group.

• [...]

• One of these graphs does not look like the others, right? We can immediately see that when a frame exceeds the 16.67ms/60fps rendering budget in WebKit/WPE under the Wayland backend, that it hard drops to 30fps. Other browsers don’t wait for a vsync to kick off rendering work and so are able to achieve frame-rates between 30fps and 60fps, when measured over multiple frames (all of these browsers are locked to the screen refresh, there is no screen tearing present). The other noticeable thing in these is that the green line is missing on the WebKit test – this shows that the timestamp delivered to the frame callback is exactly the same as Performance::now, where as the timestamps in both Chrome and Firefox appear to be the time of the last vsync. This makes sense from an animation point of view and would mean that animations that are timed using this timestamp would move at a rate that’s more consistent with the screen refresh when under load.

• You can use the split() function in Terraform to allow you to split up a string in your terraform plans. The terraform split function has two inputs, the separator character, and the string we wish to perform the split operation on. The syntax here is similar to the terraform join function.

• As we mentioned in our last blog post about OP-TEE 3.16, Bootlin planned to and contributed some interesting features in the recently released OP-TEE 3.17 ! Here is a short presentation of our contributions to this release…

• This tutorial will be helpful for beginners to install Git 2.36 on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, Ubuntu 21.10, Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, LinuxMint 20.3, Rocky Linux 8, AlmaLinux 8, and Fedora 35.

• Git is the most popular Free and Open-source distributed version control system in the world. It is easy to learn and has a lightning-fast performance.

• Git is fast and built to work with the Linux kernel, the latest version of GIT is 2.36.0 and it is a stable version released on 18-APR-2022.

Perl/Raku

• Long time no see, my dear reader! I was planning a lot for this blog, as well as for the Advanced Raku For Beginners series. But you know what they say: wanna make the God laugh – tell him your plans!

• Anyway, there is one tradition I should try to maintain howerver hard the times are: whenever I introduce something new into the Raku language an update has to be published. No exception this time.

Java

• Which programming language comes to your mind first for business applications development on the cloud?

• If you answered Java, I suggest you experience the benefits of Quarkus.

• An increasing number of Java applications run in containers. The exact number is hard to determine, because adoption of containers depends upon the market segment and cloud maturity of each particular team or company. However, some data is available—for example, data from New Relic suggests that over 62% of their customers’ Java workloads run in containers. Like all data points, this one is an imperfect proxy for the market as a whole, but the report demonstrates that a significant subset of the Java market has already moved to container-based environments. Anecdotal data also tells us that this migration trend is far from over.

• Teams using Java need to pay special attention to some aspects of container-based deployments and adopt a couple of best practices. This article focuses on the choice of garbage collector (GC) and how the default choice is based on available CPUs and memory.

• OpenJDK has been aware of Linux containers (such as Docker and Podman, as well as container orchestration frameworks such as Kubernetes) for some time. By container awareness, we mean that OpenJDK detects when it is running inside a container. In this article, you’ll learn why container awareness is useful, what has changed recently in that area of OpenJDK, and what diagnostic options are available to help developers gain insight into how the JVM determines settings.

• OpenJDK’s container awareness detection uses Linux’s control group (cgroup) filesystem to detect enforced resource quotas. As of this writing, Java 17 is the only long-term support release that supports both cgroups v1 and cgroups v2 configurations. Note, however, that there is currently work ongoing to backport cgroups v2 support to OpenJDK 11.

• OpenJDK detects whether certain resource quotas are in place when running in a container and, if so, uses those bounds for its operation. These resource limits affect, for example, the garbage collection (GC) algorithm selected by the JVM, the default size of the heap, the sizes of thread pools, and how default parallelism is determined for ForkJoinPool.

• In programming languages, sorting plays a very significant role as it reduces the complexities. In Java, the term sorting means arranging the elements/values in a particular order i.e. ascending or descending. If we talk about array sorting, it can be achieved using some built-in methods, user-defined methods, using loops, etc. These sorting approaches are capable of sorting any type of array such as numeric, or alphabetic.

Leftovers

• I read through most of the documentation before starting this migration in earnest, and was actually a bit overwhelmed. This tool is *huge*. You can configure (per command or with a configuration file) *everything* and add metadata for anything: foreground and background colors for different task states; coefficients for anything you can think of that affects how the tool calculates a task’s urgency. A few times I have been tempted to change the defaults of some of these coefficents, but then I realized there was another piece of metadata I could add that would put the task at just the right order in my list.

• My friends had a spirited debate after too many spirits. I suggested bringing back the Greek-style symposium, and it lead to a far more interesting debate.

• First, we agreed on time – two minutes. Then someone kept the time, and motioned to indicate when only thirty second remained.

• Everyone felt heard, nobody interrupted each other (well they did a bit, but the timekeeper added more time to account for it), and we suffered far less repetition. When a subject arose I didn’t have any care for, I remained silent, which shortened the debate.

• One important rule; once someone has said their piece, they should not raise the subject for the remainder of the night. Once you finish, you finish, and anyone who cannot state their point within two minutes shouldn’t say anything at all.

Integrity/Availability

Proprietary

Security

• The FluBot mobile malware operates just like the flu. It infects the device using a blended attack of smishing using an SMS or WhatsApp message followed by a voicemail. Users click on the link, download the malware and then their systems are not only compromised, but used as a platform from which to inundate their contacts with the virus. It is fast, and so convincing that even sophisticated users fall prey to it.

• Security updates have been issued by Debian (gzip and xz-utils), Fedora (dhcp and rsync), Mageia (chromium-browser-stable), openSUSE (chromium), SUSE (gzip, openjpeg2, and zabbix), and Ubuntu (klibc).

• It’s unclear whether all the countless people who have the Adobe Acrobat browser extension installed actually use it. The extension being installed automatically along with the Adobe Acrobat application, chances are that they don’t even know about it. But security-wise it doesn’t matter, an extension that’s installed and unused could still be exploited by malicious actors. So a few months ago I decided to take a look.

• [...]

• Companies don’t usually like security reports pointing out that something bad could happen. So I went out on a quest to find a Cross-site Scripting (XSS) vulnerability allowing third-party websites to abuse the privileges granted to documentcloud.adobe.com. While I eventually succeeded, this investigation yielded a bunch of dead ends that are interesting on their own. These have been reported to Adobe, and I’ll outline them in this article as well.

• TL;DR: Out of six issues reported, only one is resolved. The main issue received a partial fix, two more got fixes that didn’t quite address the issue. Two (admittedly minor) issues haven’t been addressed at all within 90 days from what I can tell.

Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt/Fear-mongering/Dramatisation

• In December of 2021, Tidelift fielded our annual survey of technologists who use open source to build applications at work. Nearly 700 people shared how they use open source software today, what holds them back, and what tools and strategies help them use it even more effectively.

• In accordance with Executive Order 14028, which is aimed at improving security for federal government networks, CISA’s SCuBA project aims to develop consistent, effective, modern, and manageable security that will help secure agency information assets stored within cloud operations.

Privacy/Surveillance

• No you don’t. If you did you wouldn’t have to hand me a long list of vendors and purposes and so called “legitimate interests” (what does that even mean, anyway?) that I have to manually disable. In fact you wouldn’t have any of those in the first place.

Defence/Aggression

• Before any shots were fired, the Biden White House took a rare step of revealing sensitive U.S. intelligence about Russia’s intentions – that President Vladimir Putin intended to send a large amount of forces to invade Ukraine, that he would send troops to topple Kyiv and that the capital city would quickly crumble under Russian assault.

• The detailed information surprised some, as it was largely accurate, save for a key point: Russia has so far failed to gain control of Kyiv.

• “What the West has chosen to do in this war is to be open in an unprecedented way in order to deter Russia’s behavior, but also to show the world that Russia has had time to take an off ramp, to change its mind,” said Berzina.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• Internet shutdowns are becoming the government’s routine response to communal clashes and violence. State governments and union territories have been issuing internet suspension orders in derogation of the letter and spirit of the Anuradha Bhasin directions and the applicable law.

• Suspension of the internet, even temporarily, adversely impacts the fundamental rights of the people of India. Therefore, an internet suspension order must follow due process of law. IFF will write to Chief Secretaries and the Home departments of all the States and Union Territories demanding compliance with the Supreme Court directions and the law applicable to internet suspensions.

Monopolies

Patents

Software Patents

• OIN’s community, according to the Network, agrees non-aggression in patents in core Linux and adjacent open source technologies by royalty-free cross-licensing of Linux patents to one another. Patents owned by the Network are similarly licensed royalty-free to any organisation that agrees not to assert its patents against the Linux System.

• [...]

• “By joining OIN, Advantest is doing its part to mitigate global patent risk for open source,” said OIN CEO said Keith Bergelt. “The benefits inherent in the cooperatively competitive business model that is harnessed through open collaboration are unmatched.”

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