● 04.21.22

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 21/04/2022: Jonathan Carter Reelected as DPL

Posted in News Roundup at 8:03 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxDistributionsDevices/EmbeddedFree Software/Open SourceLeftovers

GNU/Linux

Desktop/Laptop

• Well this is quite interesting. Framework Computer, the company that builds the fab modular Framework Laptop has announced the release of the Framework Laptop Mainboard.

• This is available for USA and Canada with a release upcoming for the UK, Germany, France, Netherlands, Austria, and Ireland sometime “soon”. What’s really fun though, is that they say it was designed in a way that you can simply use the mainboard as a standalone single-board computing platform. As they say “All you need to do is insert memory, plug in a USB-C power adapter, and hit the tiny power button on-board, and you’ve got a powered-up computer”.

Audiocasts/Shows

Kernel Space

• The readahead code in the Linux kernel is nominally responsible for reading data that has not yet been explicitly requested from storage, with the idea that it might be needed soon. The code is stable, functional, widely used, and uncontroversial, so it is reasonable to expect the code to be of high quality, and largely this is true. Recently, I found the need to document this code, which naturally shone a rather different light on it. This work revealed minor problems with functionality and significant problems with naming.

• My particular reason for wanting documentation probably colors my view of the code so I’ll start there. Once upon a time, Linux had a strong concept of “congestion” as it applied to I/O paths. If the queue of requests to some device grew too large, the backing device would be marked as “congested” and certain optional I/O requests would be skipped or delayed, particularly writeback and readahead. As time has passed, so too (apparently) has the need for congestion management. Maybe this is because many I/O devices are now faster than our CPUs but, whatever the reason, the block layer no longer tracks congestion and only a few virtual “backing devices” continue this outdated practice.

• In Linux 5.16, the only backing device that gets marked as “read congested” is the virtual device used for FUSE filesystems. As part of a project to remove all remnants of congestion tracking, I proposed that there was really nothing special about FUSE, and it should just accept all readahead requests just like everyone else. Miklos Szeredi, the maintainer of FUSE, found my reasoning to be unsatisfactory — and who could blame him? If FUSE doesn’t want readahead requests, it shouldn’t have to accept them. Trying to understand how FUSE could safely say “no” to readahead, without having to maintain the congestion-tracking functionality in common code, started me on the path to understanding readahead — once it was explained to me that it wasn’t as simple as just changing the “readahead” callback in FUSE to return zero.

• Filesystems and the virtual filesystem layer are in the business of managing files that actually exist, but the Linux “dentry cache”, which remembers the results of file-name lookups, also keeps track of files that don’t exist. This cache of “negative dentries” plays an important role in the overall performance of the system but, if it is allowed to grow too large, its role can become negative in its own right. As the 2022 Linux Storage, Filesystem, and Memory-Management Summit (LSFMM) approaches, the subject of negative dentries has come up yet again; whether one can be positive about the prospects for a resolution this time around remains unclear.

• The kernel’s dentry cache saves the results of looking up a file in a filesystem. Should the need arise to look up the same file again, the cached result can be used, avoiding a trip through the underlying filesystem and accesses to the storage device. Repeated file-name lookups are common — consider /usr/bin/bash or ~/.nethackrc — so this is an important optimization to make.

• The importance of remembering failed lookups in negative dentries may be less obvious at the outset. As it happens, repeated attempts to look up a nonexistent file are also common; an example would be the shell’s process of working through the search path every time a user types “vi” (Emacs users start the editor once and never leave its cozy confines thereafter, so they don’t benefit in the same way). Even more common are failed lookups created by the program loader searching for shared libraries or a compiler looking for include files. One is often advised to “fail fast” in this society; when it comes to lookups of files that don’t exist, that can indeed be good advice.

• So negative dentries are a good thing but, as we all know, it is possible to have too much of a good thing. While normal dentries are limited by the number of files that actually exist, there are few limits to the number of nonexistent files. As a result, it is easy for a malicious (or simply unaware) application to create negative dentries in huge numbers. If memory is tight, the memory-management subsystem will eventually work to push some of these negative dentries out. In the absence of memory pressure, though, negative dentries can accumulate indefinitely, leaving a large mess to clean up when memory does inevitably run out.

• Cloud computing is a wonderful thing; it allows efficient use of computing systems and makes virtual machines instantly available at the click of a mouse or API call. But cloud computing can also be problematic; the security of virtual machines is dependent on the security of the host system. In most deployed systems, a host computer can dig through its guests’ memory at will; users running guest systems have to just hope that doesn’t happen. There are a number of solutions to that problem under development, including this KVM guest-private memory patch set by Chao Peng and others, but some open questions remain.

• A KVM-based hypervisor runs as a user-space process on the host system. To provide a guest with memory, the hypervisor allocates that memory on the host, then uses various KVM ioctl() calls to map it into the guest’s “physical” address space. But the hypervisor retains its mapping to the memory as well, with no constraints on how the memory can be accessed. Sometimes that access is necessary for communication between the guest and the hypervisor, but the guest would likely want to keep much of that memory to itself.

• When last we looked in on the proposed trusted_for() system call, which would allow user-space interpreters and other tools to ask the kernel whether a file is “trusted” for execution, it looked like it was on-track for the mainline. That was back in October 2020; the patch has been updated multiple times since then, made its way into linux-next, and a pull request was made by Mickaël Salaün for the 5.18 merge window. But it seems that there will be more to the story of getting this functionality into the kernel, as Linus Torvalds declined to pull trusted_for(), at least partly because he did not like the name, but there were other reasons as well. While he is not opposed to the functionality it would provide, he also had strong feelings that a new system call was not the right approach.

Applications

• PeaZIP 8.6 has arrived, the latest version of this free, open source, cross-platform (Linux, macOS and Windows) GUI file manager and uncompressor. It arrives almost two months after the release of version 8.5, and it does so with some new features that you should know about.

Instructionals/Technical

• Have you made customizations to your GNOME desktop environment that you later regretted? Good news, you can easily reset GNOME to the defaults and restore all the original settings. In this tutorial, you will learn how to reset your GNOME Desktop Settings to Factory Default on Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish. The reset will put your desktop appearance and all settings, shortcuts, wallpapers and etc. to the factory default.

• There surely is need for better tooling on the BTRFS File System side.

• Eclipse is a free C and C++ IDE that can be installed on Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish. In this tutorial, we will take you through the step by step instructions to install the Eclipse C/C++ IDE on Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish as well as the Java prerequisites, via command line. Then, you can use the application to import your current C and C++ projects or develop new ones.

• In this short tutorial, you will learn how to disable automatic package updates on Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish Linux. You will see how to disable automatic updates via both command line and GUI. Although this goes against general security recommendations, this will prevent your package manager from being tied up in the background when you need to use it.

• Looking to take your company’s project management to the next level? Maybe you need to start using Scrum. Jack Wallen walks you through the deployment of the open-source IceScrum platform.

• Fail2Ban is a great security measure to deploy for your web application server. It comes with features, default filters, and actions that can immediately impact banning bad web bots, draining your system resources, and stopping attacks, which is the most crucial part of any website.

• However, most people system admins and website owners are looking for sometimes a bit more extra than what fail2ban has to offer. In the following tutorial, you will learn how to create and use custom filters on your Nginx server, which can be fine-tuned to suit your needs and expanded later.

• Discord is a top-rated online chatting program, especially amongst the gaming community. A popular feature with these channels is the inclusion of bots that range from moderation commands, music bots, trivia bots, leveling, and much more. Most bots are run on servers, and you can invite them. However, many of these Bots require monetary requirements to unlock more features, which can be unstable and a security risk.

• So, a growing trend lately is the rise of open-source, self-hosted free Discord bots, one of the absolute powerhouses in this field is called Red Discord Bot. Redbot comes with all features that can be enabled or disabled, along with a vast 3rdParty plugin page of community projects.

• Fedora 36 is out to the masses.

• I need to modify how the ipxe container mounts directories. Why? AARCH64 iPXE stuff. Specifically, I need to get my own version of a file into the directory that a container mounts when it is running. How do I do that? I don’t know yet, so I am going to look.

• I do know that the starting point for running a container in Kolla is the Ansible playbook that launches it, and that for the Ironic containers at least, that calls into a custom library called kolla_docker. This is implemented as python executable:kolla-ansible/ansible/library/kolla_docker.py. The vast majority of that file, however, it parameter parsing, and the real work is done in the call to DockerWorker. While this has ansible as the first stage in the package name, it is actually under the kolla_ansible repository.

• How To Create A Bootable Ubuntu 22.04 LTS USB Drive

• In this tutorial, we will show you the method to create a bootable Ubuntu 22.04 LTS USB drive in Windows. If you are reading the article, we are sure that you have a USB stick ( Pen drive) with enough space for Ubuntu 22.04 LTS and software like Rufus to create a bootable USB.

• Hello Ubuntu Users, Canonical has released much awaited Ubuntu 22.04 LTS desktop operating system on 21st April 2022. Code name for Ubuntu 22.04 is Jammy Jellyfish and it is a LTS (Long Term support) release and will get updates and support for next 5 years.

• In this guide, we will learn how to install Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (Jammy Jellyfish) step by step with screenshots. Before moving to installation part, let’s see what are the new features and improvement in Ubuntu 22.04 LTS.

• talking and exchanging data, establishing communication among themselves in bits, zeros and ones, making up all the great content we get off the internet.

• From watching videos on YouTube to laughing about the latest memes shared by our friends on social media. Computers use different protocols to communicate with each other, interpreted by our operating systems and presented by our favorite browsers.

• But there are many ways computers can communicate with each other, and one of the most cherished and beloved methods by advanced Linux users is using rsync.

• Today we are looking at how to install Blender 3.1.0 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.

• This tutorial will only work on Chromebooks with an Intel or AMD CPU (with Linux Apps Support) and not those with an ARM64 architecture CPU.

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

• In most modern operating systems, there are various levels of authorities a user can have, which governs who have the power to access files on the system.

• The user with the highest authority in Linux operating system is the root user, and as the root user you can do anything to the files in the system (some of those files govern the hardware in turn) from execution to deletion, this power is only limited to the root user to prevent risky actions, or even prevent actions that expose the system to catastrophic consequences (i.e., attacks).

• Sometimes you need to execute a command as the root user (or as another user without logging-out and logging in again!), but in this case you should have the authority to do so! If you can’t that means you are not in the sudo group, neither you are in the sudoers file!, in this article, we are going to explain both ways to grant a user that authority. (Note: sudo is the acronym for Super User DO).

• Every Linux distribution has its package manager that plays a role in the installation and management of software packages. For Debian/Ubuntu we have an apt package manager.

• For RHEL and modern RedHat distributions such as CentOS, Rocky Linux, and AlmaLinux, the package manager is DNF. Of course, we have universal package managers such as snap and flatpak.

• In Alpine Linux, APK, short for Alpine Package Keeper, is the package management tool. It retrieves packages and information about the packages from online repositories.

• Today we increasingly saw the importance of privacy and security in computing. This includes our browsing activity, which now needs protection even more than before. This tutorial will help you enable DNS over TLS (DoT) on Ubuntu using Quad9 service, an alternative technology to DNSCrypt or DoH, that helps preventing anybody to wiretap and/or hijack what website you are visiting on web browser. This feature is already built-in on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy Jellyfish and we do not need to install additional software.

• The performance of a computer or server environment very much depends upon the system memory and disk usage. If something is consuming more disk space then it will lead to a system error. Likewise, increasing log file size must be controlled to reduce such risk. Logrotate was introduced as a system utility that rotates, compresses the log files, and mails system logs. Such management of log files reduces disk space usage and prevents system errors.

• In this article, we are going to discuss the installation process and the configuration of logrotate on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS server.

• If you are a Star Trek fan, you’ll probably remember the phrase “You have to learn why things work on a starship.” The truth is, in most episodes, knowing how to override another ship’s console or make gunpowder didn’t come in very handy, but boy when it did, it really saved the day. Linux is a lot like that. There are a few things you probably don’t need to know very often, but when you do need to know, it makes a huge difference. In this particular post, I want to look at an odd use of the fork system call. For many purposes, you’ll never need to know this particular irregular use. But when you need it, you are really going to need it.

• This is actually based on an old client of mine who used Unix to run a massive and very critical report every day. The report had a lot of math since they were trying to optimize something and then generate a lot of reports. In those days, the output of the report was on old green-bar paper on a line printer. The problem was that the report took something like 14 hours to run including the printouts. If someone discovered something wrong, there was no time to run the report again because the next day’s report would have to start before the second run would finish.

Wine or Emulation

• Valve has now officially released the latest version of Proton, the Steam Play compatibility tool that allows Windows games to run on the Steam Deck and Linux desktops. Proton 7.0-2 is the new main stable version, not to be confused with Proton Experimental that was also updated recently.

• Other changes include a fix for Resident Evil Revelations 2 not starting on the Steam Deck, Wine Mono (a replacement for the .NET Framework) was upgraded to version 7.2.0 and dxvk-nvapi (NVAPI implementation on top of DXVK) to version 0.5.4 for a small bug fix. The changelog can be seen on GitHub.

Games

• SCS Software are showing off all the advancements made to Euro Truck Simulator 2 over the years, with a brand new video to showcase it. Plus, there’s a new Beta available.

• Their last proper trailer was back in 2012, and with how many huge upgrades they’ve given the game it was of course very much overdue for a proper trailer to show it off. It’s not just that though, the game is approaching 10 years old (yes, really!) and so it’s a good way to mark the occasion…

• After the success of their Kickstarter back in 2020 and a delay to the release, Half Human Games have now confirmed that Dwerve will launch on May 31.

• What is it? Dwerve is a tower defense dungeon game that also blends in dungeon crawling. You’re not just looking from afar placing down towers, you’re part of the action here. You play as a young dwarf tinkerer who adventures into a ruined kingdom and unearths the lost technologies of the ancient warsmiths: turrets and traps. These are the only weapons that can protect the dwarves from Witch-Queen Vandra and her army of bloodthirsty trolls and monstrous creatures hellbent on conquering the surface.

• Monolith of Minds and Graffiti Games have today launched Lila’s Sky Ark, a feast for the eyes if you love pixel-art. The second game from Monolith of Minds, acting as a prequel to the first game Resolutiion.

• “Lila’s psychedelic world is in grave danger. Help her and her eccentric friends stop the Conductor’s minions from destroying all things musical and magical in this meditative action-adventure game. Explore this dark yet groovy world as you unravel the poetic mystery that is Lila’s story. Discover secrets, solve puzzles, and battle bizarre beasts and punishing bosses as you attempt to unite the Spirits and save the mysterious Sky Island from ruin.”

Desktop Environments/WMs

• Since then, I have applied fixes for running in EasyOS, version 3.5.1.1, 3.5.1.2, and now 3.5.1.3.

• In JWMDesk, “Desktop -> Icon layout”, there are radiobuttons to flip between the traditional Puppy desktop icon layout, and the standard EasyOS layout.

• I flipped to Puppy layout; however, after switching back to EasyOS layout, the icon layout was somewhat broken. That has been fixed by 3.5.1.3. The script edited is /usr/local/desksetup/func

Distributions

IBM/Red Hat/Fedora

• Astute observers will have noticed recently that Fedora rawhide composes stopped after 2022-04-13 and didn’t resume until 2022-04-19. A particularly odd bug was to blame. This is the story of that bug and my investigations of it.

• A bit of background first on how nightly images are made currently. There’s a cron job that calls a script (called nightly.sh) in the pungi-fedora pagure.io git repo. It does a number of small associated things (like sending message bus messages of status, sending report emails, copying results around, etc) but the big thing it does is to call pungi. pungi in turn looks at it’s config (in that same pungi-fedora repo) and does all the heavy lifting of the compose, calling mostly out to koji to do things, but also doing some things locally. For images, pungi calls koji with some parameters (use this repo and name for kickstart file, use these compose repos for packages, etc). koji then calls different tools depending on what the image is. For livemedia the tool is livemedia-creator (in the lorax package), for qcow2/raw images it calls ImageFactory/oz to do the actual image build on a builder.

• To maximize the end-to-end performance of services, applications and databases on a server, system administrators usually carry out custom performance tunning, using various tools, both generic operating system tools as well as third-party tools. One of the most useful performance tuning tools on CentOS/RHEL/Fedora Linux is Tuned.

• cgroups allow for system resources to be limited for certain user’s processes, which are defined in configuration files. This is useful e.g. if you wish to limit a compiler’s maximum memory usage and avoid it grinding the system to a halt.

• I recently participated in a Red Hat online customer event that changed my thinking about how digital transformation takes place, and how digital capabilities can transform customer events. It was an intentionally intimate affair—two discussion leaders, one facilitator, and about ten customer executives. The format was an interesting one too—first a “fireside chat” with me, George Westerman of MIT, and Mike Walker, the facilitator, who runs Red Hat’s Open Innovation Labs. Then we moved into a “Lean Coffee” session, in which participants suggest topics, talk about them for five minutes, and vote whether to continue the same topic for another five minutes or move to another. It’s a lively format that never gets boring. And the graphic facilitator Tricia Walker annotated the proceedings (see photo).

• Whether it’s called “man in the middle” or “meddler in the middle”, these types of attacks target communications that we assume are safe. This episode uncovers how complex this malicious form of interception has become.

• In response to past issues raised by partners, IBM subsidiary Red Hat is investing in improvements to its training and certification offerings for partners, including free access to a range of training courses, discounts on certification exams and a new dynamic skills path experience to help with education goals, job roles and IT challenges.

• In this Techaisle Take analysis, I will discuss which customer challenges Red Hat is addressing with its cloud services, market differentiation, especially VMware, and why its significant value lies in providing a consistent full-stack development and operational experience.

Debian Family

• The voting period and tally of votes for the Debian Project Leader election has just concluded, and the winner is Jonathan Carter, who has been elected for third time. Congratulations! The new term for the project leader starts on 2022-04-21.

• 354 of 1,023 Developers voted using the Condorcet method.

• More information about the results of the voting are available on the Debian Project Leader Elections 2022 page.

• The Debian project leader election has completed and Jonathan Carter has been reelected for his third term. For more information, see the Debian vote page. We looked at the candidates back in March.

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

• Okay, so you have installed or upgraded to Ubuntu 22.04 LTS: fantastic — but now what?

• To be honest Ubuntu 22.04 is pretty perfect out-of-the-box. You get a fast, fluid OS full of the best free software and the most essential features. That said there are a few post-install tweaks I do that I think make the Ubuntu desktop experience even better.

• Here is a list of simple tweaks and things to do after installing Ubuntu 22.04, to get a smoother and better experience.

• I presume that you are absolutely new to Ubuntu while sharing these tips. If you are an existing Ubuntu user, some tips may sound too elementary to you. However, you’ll still find a few good tweaks that are specific to the new Ubuntu 22.04 features.

• The Kubuntu Team is happy to announce that Kubuntu 22.04 LTS has been released, featuring the beautiful KDE Plasma 5.24 LTS: simple by default, powerful when needed.

• Codenamed “Jammy Jellyfish”, Kubuntu 22.04 continues our tradition of giving you Friendly Computing by integrating the latest and greatest Free Software technologies into a high-quality, easy-to-use Linux distribution.

• The team has been hard at work through this cycle, introducing new features and fixing bugs.

• Under the hood, there have been updates to many core packages, including a new 5.15-based kernel, KDE Frameworks 5.92, Plasma 5.24 LTS and KDE Gear (formerly Applications) 21.12.3.

• Ubuntu has long been a serious desktop for the business, and this new long-term support version is better than ever for people who want a work Linux desktop.

• Canonical announced the immediate release of its flagship desktop and enterprise operating system, Ubuntu 22.04 LTS ‘Jammy Jellyfish.’

• The wait is finally over. Ubuntu 22.04 has finally arrived and is available to download! Undoubtedly, Ubuntu 22.04 packs exciting new features to give a better user experience, performance, and speed than ever before.

• The Ubuntu 22.04 LTS release, codenamed “Jammy Jellyfish”, is now available. It comes in several editions (Desktop, Server, Cloud, and Core) and multiple flavors (Ubuntu Budgie, Kubuntu, Lubuntu, Ubuntu Kylin, Ubuntu MATE, UbuntuStudio, and Xubuntu). Lots more information can be found in the release notes.

• Thanks to all the hard work from our contributors, Lubuntu 22.04 LTS has been released. With the codename Jammy Jellyfish, Lubuntu 22.04 is the 22nd release of Lubuntu, the eighth release of Lubuntu with LXQt as the default desktop environment.

• Canonical Ubuntu 22.04 LTS is now generally available, featuring significant leaps forward in cloud confidential computing, real-time kernel for industrial applications, and enterprise Active Directory, PCI-DSS, HIPAA, FIPS and FedRAMP compliance – raising the bar for open source from cloud to edge, IoT and workstations. Canonical partners with industry leaders to deliver enterprise-grade security, long-term maintenance and support on all major architectures, hardware and clouds.

• “Our mission is to be a secure, reliable and consistent open-source platform – everywhere”, said Mark Shuttleworth, CEO of Canonical. “Ubuntu 22.04 LTS unlocks innovation for industries with demanding infrastructure security requirements, such as telecommunications and industrial automation, underpinning their digital transformation.“

• The Ubuntu Studio team is pleased to announce the release of Ubuntu Studio 22.04, code-named “Jammy Jellyfish”. This marks Ubuntu Studio’s 31st release. This release is a Long-Term Support release and as such, it is supported for 3 years (until April 2025).

• Since it’s just out, you may experience some issues, so you might want to wait a bit before upgrading. Please see the release notes for a complete list of changes and known issues.

• April has been an exciting month. On April 5th, the IBM z16 was released. For those of you who aren’t aware, this is the IBM zSystems class of mainframes that I’ve been working on at IBM for the past three years. As a Developer Advocate, I’ve been able to spend a lot of time digging into the internals, learning about the implementation of DevOps practices and incorporation of Linux into environments, and so much more. I’ve also had the opportunity to work with dozens of open source projects in the Linux world as they get their software to run on the s390x architecture. This includes working with several Linux distributions, and most recently forming the Open Mainframe Project Linux Distributions Working Group with openSUSE’s Sarah Julia Kriesch.

• Canonical’s Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, aka “Jammy Jellyfish,” is now generally available with features that raise the bar for open source — from cloud, to edge, to IoT and workstations.

• The desktop version is one of the biggest LTS releases from Ubuntu with respect to visual and feature changes. This major upgrade to GNOME 42 brings changes to the desktop itself in terms of layout, appearance, and how things work.

• If the Ubuntu desktop is your only connection to Canonical’s infrastructure, you can expect some mild and minor hands-on adjustments. If you deal with the rest of Ubuntu’s enterprise world, you will find a lot more hardcore improvements in security and performance for IoT and cloud computing connections.

• Canonical announced the new release on Thursday, detailing features that bring significant leaps forward in cloud confidential computing, real-time kernel for industrial applications, and enterprise Active Directory, PCI-DSS, HIPAA, FIPS, and FedRAMP compliance.

• The developers over at Canonical have been busy baking a yummy new version of Ubuntu recently, and following a brief beta period, it is finally time to take the open-source operating system out of the oven. Yes, folks, the stable Ubuntu 22.04 is finally here!

• Code-named “Jammy Jellyfish,” Ubuntu 22.04 is an “LTS” version, which stands for “Long Term Support.” Yeah, that means exactly what it sounds like. The Linux distribution will be supported for a long time — five years to be exact. Very nice.

• “Our mission is to be a secure, reliable and consistent open-source platform — everywhere. Ubuntu 22.04 LTS unlocks innovation for industries with demanding infrastructure security requirements, such as telecommunications and industrial automation, underpinning their digital transformation,” says Mark Shuttleworth, Canonical CEO.

• Learn the commands to install WineHQ on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy JellyFish. If you don’t know about Wine then it stands for Wine Is Not an Emulator, a program that allows us to use Windows software on Linux. You do not need a Windows installation on your computer to start programs programmed for Windows with Wine.

• The new Ubuntu LTS is out. Codenamed “Jammy Jellyfish”, Ubuntu 22.04 sports a really slick GNOME 42 desktop with some amazing themes, icons, and other nice touches that possibly makes 22.04 the best Ubuntu release in years.

• The Ubuntu OpenStack team at Canonical is pleased to announce the general availability of OpenStack Yoga on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (Jammy Jellyfish) and Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa) via the Ubuntu Cloud Archive. Details of the Yoga release can be found at: https://www.openstack.org/software/yoga

• To get access to the Ubuntu Yoga packages:

• Ubuntu 22.04 LTS

• OpenStack Yoga is available by default on Ubuntu 22.04.

• Ubuntu 20.04 LTS

• The Ubuntu Cloud Archive for OpenStack Yoga can be enabled on Ubuntu 20.04 by running the following command:

• sudo add-apt-repository cloud-archive:yoga The Ubuntu Cloud Archive for Yoga includes updates for:

• aodh, barbican, ceilometer, ceph (17.1.0), cinder, designate, designate-dashboard, dpdk (21.11), glance, gnocchi, heat, heat-dashboard, horizon, ironic, ironic-ui, keystone, libvirt (8.0.0), magnum, magnum-ui, manila, manila-ui, masakari, mistral, murano, murano-dashboard, networking-arista, networking-bagpipe, networking-baremetal, networking-bgpvpn, networking-hyperv, networking-l2gw, networking-mlnx, networking-odl, networking-sfc, neutron, neutron-dynamic-routing, neutron-fwaas, neutron-vpnaas, nova, octavia, octavia-dashboard, openstack-trove, openvswitch (2.17.0), ovn (22.03.0), ovn-octavia-provider, placement, sahara, sahara-dashboard, senlin, swift, trove-dashboard, vmware-nsx, vitrage, watcher, watcher-dashboard, zaqar, and zaqar-ui.

• The Xubuntu team is happy to announce the results of the 22.04 community wallpaper contest!

• As always, we’d like to send out a huge thanks to every contestant. The Xubuntu Community Wallpaper Contest gives us a unique chance to interact with the community and get contributions from members who may otherwise not have had the opportunity to join in before. With around 130 submissions, the contest garnered less interest this time around, but we still had a lot of great work to pick from. All of the submissions are browsable on the 22.04 contest page at contest.xubuntu.org.

• The Xubuntu team is happy to announce the immediate release of Xubuntu 22.04.

• Xubuntu 22.04, codenamed Jammy Jellyfish, is a long-term support (LTS) release and will be supported for 3 years, until 2025.

• The Xubuntu and Xfce development teams have made great strides in usability, expanded features, and additional applications in the last two years. Users coming from 20.04 will be delighted with improvements found in Xfce 4.16 and our expanded application set. 21.10 users will appreciate the added stability that comes from the numerous maintenance releases that landed this cycle.

• The leading fair in London, Paris, Frankfurt and Singapore will reopen the doors to C-level experts and executives in Frankfurt. Canonical will be attending as a Gold Sponsor, presenting strategies and trends for industry leading companies.

Devices/Embedded

Open Hardware/Modding

• Listening to a speaker who interjects words such as “um,” “uuh,” and “so” can be extremely distracting and take away from the message being conveyed, which is why Benedikt Groß, Maik Groß, Thibault Durand set out to build a small device that can help encourage speakers to make their language more concise. Their experimental solution, called Mind the “Uuh,” constantly listens to the words being spoken and generates an audible alert if the word “uuh” is detected.

• The team began by collecting around 1,500 samples of audio that ranged in length from 300ms to 1s and contained either noise, random words, or the word “uuh.” Then, after running it through a filter and training a Keras neural network using Edge Impulse, deployed it onto a Nano 33 BLE Sense. The board was connected to a seven-segment display via two shift registers that show the current “uuh” count, as well as a servo motor that dings a bell to generate the alert.

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• As the internet becomes increasingly closed and centralized, consolidation and the opportunity for anti-competitive behavior rises. We are encouraged to see legislators and regulators in many jurisdictions exploring how to update consumer protection and competition policies. We look forward to working together to advance innovation, interoperability, and consumer choice.

• On March 1st, 2022, MDN Web Docs released a new design and a new brand identity. Overall, the community responded to the redesign enthusiastically and we received many positive messages and kudos. We also received valuable feedback on some of the things we didn’t get quite right, like the browser compatibility table changes as well as some accessibility and readability issues.

• For us, MDN Web Docs has always been synonymous with the term Ubuntu, “I am because we are.” Translated in this context, “MDN Web Docs is the amazing resource it is because of our community’s support, feedback, and contributions.”

FSF

• As announced at this year’s LibrePlanet, the Free Software Foundation (FSF) is hosting a series of workshops over the coming weeks. Please see the schedule below for dates, times, workshop descriptions, and registration links.

• Capacity to these events is limited, so we encourage you to register soon to ensure your spot.

GNU Projects

• Here are a few new features I’ve added to GNU ELPA and upstream GNU Emacs recently. Text is adapted from the in-tree documentation I wrote for the new features. Thanks to everyone who offered feedback on my patches.

Programming/Development

• Why would you want to go to the trouble? Because you’re a programmer, an engineer, or a system administrator who wants to get the most from Linux. Or, you’re a power user, and you want to push your computer as far as you can take it. If that’s you, then these are the distributions for you.

• It was a quick one, but I did a 22ish minute live this thursday with an intro to some great dev-ops / infrastructure tools. Check it out below. I’m going to try and do a weekly live on Thursdays at 8pm EDT. Some will be fun, some may not be! lol. Either way, join me and hop in the chat.. I love talking to you guys! Maybe we’ll do some guests as well.

• Dear Flang Community and Supporters,

• NVIDIA’s involvement in fir-dev, the fir-dev branch on github flang-compiler/18-llvm-project, is coming to a close.

• Thank you to everyone who contributed to fir-dev and to all of the dedicated contributors and reviewers who helped upstream code to llvm-project.

• As of April 21, 2022, NVIDIA will transition to contributing directly to llvm-project. NVIDIA will no longer be contributing to or upstreaming code from fir-dev.

• Access to fir-dev will remain open. There will be no change in the access policies or permissions without consensus of the flang community. Others are free to continue to use fir-dev.

• NVIDIA will continue to contribute to llvm-project/flang with the same dedication that we have in the past. Our commitment to flang is unwavering.

• This is the 100th issue of syslog-ng Insider, a monthly newsletter that brings you syslog-ng-related news.

• EasyOS has ‘xfdiff’ to see differences between two files. You can find it in the “Utility” menu. However, if you would like something more heavy-duty, that also compares folders and can generate patch files, then consider Meld…

• System updates are a necessary evil for any internet-facing server, unless you want your system to become part of a botnet. This is especially true for CI systems since they let people on the internet run code on machines, often leading to unfair use such as cryptomining (this one is hard to avoid though)!

• The problem with system updates is not the 2 or 3 minutes of downtime that it takes to reboot, it is that we cannot reboot while any CI job is running. Scheduling a reboot thus first requires to stop accepting new jobs, wait for the current ones to finish, then finally reboot. This solution may be acceptable if your jobs take ~30 minutes, but what if they last 6h? A reboot suddenly gets close to a typical 8h work day, and we definitely want to have someone looking over the reboot sequence so they can revert to a previous boot configuration if the new one failed.

• This problem may be addressed in a cloud environment by live-migrating services/containers/VMs from a non-updated host to an updated one. This is unfortunately a lot more complex to pull off for a bare-metal CI without having a second CI gateway and designing synchronization systems/hardware to arbiter access to the test machines’s power/serial consoles/boot configuration.

• So, while we cannot always avoid the need to drain the CI jobs before rebooting, what we can do is reduce the cases in which we need to perform this action. Unfortunately, containers have been designed with atomic updates in mind (this is why we want to use them), but that means that trivial operations such as adding an ssh key, a Wireguard peer, or updating a firewall rule will require a reboot. A hacky solution may be for the admins to update the infra container then log in the different CI gateways and manually reproduce the changes they have done in the new container. These changes would be lost at the next reboot, but this is not a problem since the CI gateway would use the latest container when rebooting which already contains the updates. While possible, this solution is error-prone and not testable ahead of time, which is against the requirements for the gateway we laid out in Part 3.

Python

• Using strings with contents that are supplied by users can be fraught with peril; SQL injection is a well-known technique for attacking applications that stems from that, for example. Generally, database frameworks and libraries provide mechanisms that seek to lead programmers toward doing The Right Thing, with parameterized queries and the like, but they cannot enforce that—inventive developers will seemingly always find ways to inject user input into places it should not go. A recently adopted Python Enhancement Proposal (PEP) provides a way to enforce the use of strings that are untainted by user input, but it uses the optional typing features of the language to do so; those wanting to take advantage of it will need to be running a type-checking program.

Rust

• Over the past years, Rust has grown from a language used by a few dedicated users into a well-known language used by lots of highly visible projects and successful companies. As the Rust user base, the community, and the ecosystem continues to grow, we need to look forward and consider how we need to scale to adapt to the needs of the ever expanding Rust ecosystem.

• Recently, the compiler team shared their blog post detailing their ambitions for 2022, and the language team published a roadmap with their vision for Rust in 2024.

Leftovers

• In computer science, systems are typically divided into two categories: software and hardware. However, there is an additional layer in between, referred to as middleware, which is a software “pipeline,” an operation, a process, or an application between the operating system and the end user. This article aims to define middleware and reflect on its necessity, as well as address controversies about when and where it applies. It also explores the application of middleware in emerging technologies such as cloud computing and the IoT (Internet of Things), as well as future middleware developments.

• The term was introduced in the early 1980s. It encompasses complex software solutions that modernize legacy systems—typically mainframes—through new features such as software and application components. Initially, it was solely used to expand the layer separating the network and application layers. Subsequently, its use expanded to serve as the layer above the operating system and network layer, and below the application layer. This means that middleware could now facilitate the generic communication between the application component and the distributed network.

Integrity/Availability

Proprietary

Pseudo-Open Source

Privatisation/Privateering

Linux Foundation

Security

• Drupal has released security updates to address vulnerabilities affecting Drupal 9.2 and 9.3. An attacker could exploit these vulnerabilities to take control of an affected system.

• Cisco has released security updates to address vulnerabilities in multiple Cisco products. An attacker could exploit some of these vulnerabilities to take control of an affected system. For updates addressing lower severity vulnerabilities, see the Cisco Security Advisories page.

• While previously the botnet has targeted Microsoft Exchange servers that are vulnerable to bugs like ProxyLogon, in this current campaign Lemon Duck is achieving initial access via exposed Docker APIs. Docker, a platform used to run container workloads in the cloud, provides APIs to support automation for developers. However, misconfigured cloud instances can expose these APIs to the internet, allowing attackers to leverage them for various nefarious purposes.

Defence/Aggression

• Yandex, Russia’s Google, has withdrawn its financial guidance for 2022 due to uncertainty over what this year will yield for the corporation.

• The Moscow-headquartered business provides a search engine that has a commanding share of the local search market, as well as tools including e-commerce, mobile applications, an email service, transportation, and online advertising.

• The majority of its operations are located in Russia, the pariah state shunned by much of the world for its continuing invasion of Ukraine, and the company is feeling the squeeze of sanctions imposed by the West – even if Russian dictator Vladimir Putin is shrugging them off as a minor irritant.

• In a filing to update investors [PDF], Yandex said: “Current geopolitical tensions, their impact on the Russian and global economy, and the related stresses in broader social and business environment, have created exceptional challenges for our business.”

Environment

Energy

Civil Rights/Policing

• Amazon today announced the creation of a $1 billion venture investment program with the aim to spur innovation in three areas close to its heart: fulfillment, logistics, and the supply chain.

• The Amazon Industrial Innovation Fund (AIIF) will be bankrolled using 11 days of the US giant’s $33bn annual net income from 2021 (or 58 days of non-AWS annual operating income.)

• Digital rights violations enable and escalate offline violence, deepening humanitarian crises. The calculated attacks targeting digital systems – essential to people’s safety and wellbeing – are unacceptable. At this critical juncture in history, when human rights violations are rampant from Ukraine to Myanmar, we’ve prepared a new briefing on the 49th session of the United Nations (U.N.) Human Rights Council. The briefing, Digital Rights at the U.N. HRC 49 and Beyond, takes stock of the state of digital rights at the global level, exploring key digital rights issues during this session. It’s aimed at educating delegates on the impact of these issues on human rights, and guiding them in next steps for advancing global norms and standards that will protect human rights.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• Today, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals denied a petition by broadband providers to rehear the court’s decision in ACA Connects v. Bonta, rejecting yet another attempt by broadband providers to overturn California’s net neutrality law. Earlier this year, the court issued its opinion and determined the California consumer protection law could go into effect. Public Knowledge and other consumer groups filed an amicus brief in this case last year.

Monopolies

Copyrights

• Before humans stored memories as zeroes and ones, we turned to digital devices of another kind — preserving knowledge on the surface of fingers and palms. Kensy Cooperrider leads us through a millennium of “hand mnemonics” and the variety of techniques practised by Buddhist monks, Latin linguists, and Renaissance musicians for remembering what might otherwise elude the mind.

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