● 04.22.22

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 22/04/2022: Mesa 22.0.2 and Sparky 2022.04 Special Editions

Posted in News Roundup at 4:44 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxDistributionsDevices/EmbeddedFree Software/Open SourceLeftovers

GNU/Linux

Desktop/Laptop

• What is the best Chromebook for students? Our number one pick is the Google Pixelbook Go! We analyzed each Chromebook’s processor, display, storage, and price to compile a list of the best student-proof laptops.

Server

•  reServer Jetson-50-1-H4 is an AI inference edge server powered by Jetson AGX Orin 64GB with up to 275 TOPS of AI performance, and based on the same form factor as Seeed Studio’s reServer 2-bay multimedia NAS introduced last year with an Intel Core Tiger Lake single board computer.

• The 12-core Arm server comes with 32GB LPDDR5, a 256GB NVMe SSD pre-loaded with the Jetpack SDK and the open-source Triton Inference server, two SATA bays for 2.5-inch and 3.5-inch drives, up to 10 Gbps Ethernet, dual 8K video output via HDMI and DisplayPort, USB 3.2 ports, and more.

Audiocasts/Shows

• Welcome to Hardware Addicts, a proud member of the Destination Linux Network. Hardware Addicts is the podcast that focuses on the physical components that powers our technology world.

• In this episode, we’re going to be talking about microchip implants and answer the questions whether it’s time to embrace this new technology? Then we head to Camera Corner where Wendy will talk about a camera battery that gets an upgrade which every manufacturer needs to adopt.

• So Sit back, Relax, and Plug In because Hardware Addicts Starts Now!

• Alex shares some handy tools, and some old friends join us for a special edition of the show.

Kernel Space

• Intel added upcoming Raptor Lake-P CPU support for Intel OpenGL and Vulkan drivers to the Linux 5.19 driver recently, which is slated to release later this year. The same graphics driver support for the upcoming processor has been added to Mesa 22.2.

Graphics Stack

Applications

• The GNOME Foundation has not been giving as much news as we wish it has, but doesn’t mean nothing happened!

• In the hopes of making GNOME useful for as many people as possible and finding sustainable funding, the Foundation needs to run public programmes. Let’s examine together what makes a suitable programme, what direction the Foundation is taking, and how you can help shaping the programme and the future of the GNOME Project as an active community member.

• I wanted something to store all my to-do stuff, so I created this simple task list application!

• With Tasks, you can create new tasks by typing the new task’s name in the text field at the bottom of the window, and when hovering over some task it displays an edit and remove button.

• In the application header it has a task count on the left, showing the total number of tasks, and a clear and an about button on the right, which removes all the tasks and opens an about page, respectively.

• Joplin supports storing notes on a number of protocols including Nextcloud and WebDAV. I setup WebDAV because it’s easiest, here is Digital Ocean instructions for WebDAV on Apache [3]. That basically works. One problem for my use case is that the Joplin client doesn’t support accounts on multiple servers and the only released way of sharing notes between accounts is using the paid Joplin Cloud service.

• There is a Joplin Server in beta which allows sharing notes but that is designed to run in Docker and is written in TypeScript so it was too much pain to setup. One mitigating factor is that there are “Notebooks” which are collections of notes. So if multiple people who trust each other share an account they can have Notebooks for personal notes and a Notebook for shared notes.

• More and more users are choosing to migrate from the usual paper books to electronic books. We store these files on our disk drives, but like the rest of the content, they need some organization. A piece of software that can help us a lot in this type of task is the ebook manager , Calibre.

• The first thing we should know is that this is a totally free open source application that has all the functions that we are going to need. It not only focuses on the management of our electronic book libraries , but goes much further. In this way, from Caliber we will have the possibility of avoiding these contents, reading them, converting them and much more. All this through a peculiar user interface that we can also customize.

Instructionals/Technical

• Good news for Ubuntu users, canonical has released Ubuntu 22.04 LTS operating system for Desktop and Servers. As this is the LTS (Long Term Support) release, so we will get updates for next 5 years (till 2027). Jammy Jellyfish is the code for this release.

• In the last article, we have discussed about Ansible ad hoc commands. Whatever we learned there will be applied in this article but in a different way. This tutorial explains what is a Playbook in Ansible and how to work with Ansible Playbooks with examples.

• As Ubuntu users, especially as administrators, we need to check how much RAM resources our system uses and how much of it is free. We also know that most administrative tasks are better done from the Linux command line than from the graphical user interface. For example, servers usually work on the shell, and there is no graphical user interface at all. Since it is most important to control the memory resources on servers, it is best to learn the appropriate commands that can help us manage servers.

• The internet is a vast network system full of databases, servers, routers, and other web structures. When you type a web address and hit the enter button on your web browser, it routes through your internet connection to the host address via the web. In the middle of the destination, when your packet starts the journey from the computer and reaches the destination server, it travels a lot inside the web. Many Linux, Windows, and Mac tools allow you to track every step of your internet packet. The traceroute command is one of the most used tools that you can use on Linux to track every step, live status, connection strength, latency, and many more regarding your internet packets.

• Finally, TIL, what can all be the reason for systemd services to hang indefinitely. The internet is flooded with numerous reports on this topic but no clear answers. So no more uselessly marked workarounds like: systemctl daemon-reload and systemctl-daemon-reexec for this scenario.

• In this tutorial we will learn how to install all the necessary components in an Ubuntu 22.04 machine to serve as a web server so we can use WordPress on it. From first launch to ready-to-browse.

• In a Linux server there are various applications we can use as a web server. The two most popular web servers in the market are the Apache HTTP Server and NGINX .

• While there are others, these two dominate almost all of the market. In this tutorial we will focus on learning how to serve WordPress using NGINX, using the combination of applications commonly known in acronyms as the LEMP stack.

• Plex Media Server is software to store all your digital media content and access it via a client application such as your TV, NVIDIA Shield, Roku, Mobile App, and many more platforms. Plex Media Server organizes your files and content into categories. It’s extremely popular with people storing TV Shows and Movie Libraries, and if your connection is good enough, share it with your friends and family. Over time Plex Media Server has grown much and now supports many platforms.

• In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install Plex Media Server on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy Jellyfish by securely importing the GPG key and official Plex repository and some tips on basic sets and creating a reverse proxy with Nginx.

• Google Chrome is the most used Internet Explorer software on the earth, with a recent update in 2021 that Chrome is currently the primary browser of more than 2.65 billion internet users. However, as you would know, after installing Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy Jellyfish, only Mozilla Firefox is packaged with the distribution but luckily, installing Google Chrome is a straightforward task.

• In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install Google Chrome in three alternative ways: stable, beta, or unstable versions on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy Jellyfish using the command line console.

• Along with the usual read, write, and execute file permissions, Linux files have another set of attributes that control other characteristics of the file. Here’s how to see them and change them.

• Discord is a free voice, video, and text chat app used by tens of millions of people ages 13+ to talk and hang out with their communities and friends. Users communicate with voice calls, video calls, text messaging, media, and files in private chats or as part of communities called “servers.” Discord is available on Windows, macOS, and Linux Distros.

• In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install the Discord client on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy Jellyfish using three different methods with the command line terminal.

• SSH (Secure Shell) is a cryptographic protocol to provide secure data transmission over insecure networks. OpenSSH is the server that implements SSH protocol to provide remote server shell access.

• Today, I have created a new Ubuntu 22.04 Desktop virtual machine. After installation, I found that the SSH server is not enabled by default. So I have installed the OpenSSH server and enabled the SSH connections. This tutorial explains you to how to install and enable SSH on an Ubuntu 22.04 Linux system.

• This tutorial will guide you to upgrade from Ubuntu 21.10 to Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. Ubuntu 22.04 LTS was released on 21 April 2022. Ubuntu 22.04 LTS will be supported for five years till April 2027. Ubuntu 22.04 LTS is powered by Linux Kernel 5.15.

• Previously, we published one article on how to upgrade Ubuntu 20.04 LTS to Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. If you are Ubuntu 20.04 LTS user then it can be useful for you.

• The new Ubuntu 22.04 LTS has been released! If you’re going to do a fresh install, then this tutorial may help to burn the ISO image into your USB stick.

• Working under a Linux operating system distribution gives you a very unique perspective on how alterable the computing world can be. For instance, getting rid of white space characters on text files can somewhat sound like a tedious task unless you are using Linux as your primary operating system.

• White spaces are not just horizontal like the spacing of words in this article or other printable characters. White spaces also exist as vertical spacing of lines and/or paragraphs. So why remove white spaces? The primary reason is to sanitize the outlook of your targeted text file.

• Hello, my friends. Linux is great, and it’s great because of the absurd amount of software we can install on the system. This makes it ideal for almost any type of user such as developers, professionals, and enthusiasts. Proof of this is that we can install all kinds of applications. Today, for example, you will learn how to install QPrompt on Debian 11.

• PHP 7.4 is a significant update of the PHP language that was “officially” released on November 28, 2019. This is a standard upgrade from now on from the existing PHP 7.3 release to PHP 7.4, which is the last version in the 7 PHP series that brings in arrow functions for cleaner one-liners, preloading for improved performance, typed properties in classes, improved type variances, spread operator in arrays and much more.

• In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install PHP 7.4 on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy Jellyfish by importing the Ondřej Surý repository, the maintainer for PHP on Debian, and installing, upgrading, or removing howto instructions.

• Recently, I started doing a while bunch of new models in SketchUp, and I always try to only use my own components, never anything from the 3D warehouse. This means extra work, but also more satisfaction when you succeed. But then, I did face one big challenge. How to make a helix, a three-dimensional spiral, that most elusive of shapes.

• In essence, most of 3D design is just figuring the intricate intersect of planes in three dimensions. Sounds trivial, but sometimes, you end up scratching your head, not quite sure what to do. I decided to check a number of online tutorials, and while they do accomplish the task, I found them impossible to reproduce. The actual steps needed in SketchUp baffled me more than the concept of how a helix should look like. Well, eventually, with great satisfaction, I worked it out. It’s not the prettiest or most efficient method, but it’s dead simple. Let me show you.

• Linux is becoming a developer’s programming paradise because it is an open-source operating system and freely available. The Turbo C compiler is already an old way to compile programs, so we programmers should switch to Linux to use a new programming environment. In this article, we will explain how to write, compile and run a simple C program. This will serve you as a foundation to move on to more complicated and useful C programs that you can write and run on Linux.

• We have run the steps and commands mentioned in this article on an Ubuntu 22.04 LTS system, but it works exactly the same on other versions like Ubuntu 20.04 or distributions like Debian 11.

• Ubuntu 22.04 is officially released on 22 April 2022 and available on all cloud platforms also. Here you are going to upgrade your system or server from Ubuntu 20.04 to Ubuntu 22.04. If you are running Ubuntu 18.04, you need to first upgrade to Ubuntu 20.04 and then finally upgrade to 22.04 LTS.

• In this guide you are going to learn how to clean up your Ubuntu 20.04 server or system’s unused packages, old kernels, journal logs, apt cache and then upgrade to 22.04 LTS in simple steps.

• Many Java-based programs require the Java Runtime Environment (JRE) to run smoothly regardless of the operating system. For development, most IDEs like Eclipse and NetBeans require the Java Development Kit (JDK) on your computer. Whether you’re a newbie who wants to learn how to develop or an application you have installed requires a Java installation on your system, we’ve got you covered. Setting up the JAVA_HOME path is quite simple.

• In this tutorial, we will learn how to install the JDK on Ubuntu 20.04 and Ubuntu 22.04 and set up the Java_HOME path. Let’s start with the installation of the JDK.

• Kustomize is used for Kubernetes native configuration management. It introduces a template-free way to customize application configuration that simplifies the use of off-the-shelf applications. Kustomize traverses a Kubernetes manifest to add, remove or update configuration options without forking. It is available both as a standalone binary and as a native feature of kubectl as apply -k.

• Kustomize simplifies deployments by allowing you to create an entire Kubernetes application out of individual pieces — without touching the YAML configuration files for the individual components.

• Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (“Jammy Jellyfish”) has just been released! Checkout the release page here.

• In this guide we will learn how to safely upgrade from Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa) or the previous release Ubuntu 21.04 to Ubuntu 22.04 LTS using the command-line

Wine or Emulation

• Just as I was wrapping up the week, turns out that Valve decided to surprise us with a new Proton version, namely Proton 7.0-2.

• Let’s look at the changes together! Since the log of changes provided by Valve is all in random order, we did a little clean-up and categorization to make it easier to read.

Games

• Sony’s doubling down on their commitment to PC gaming and now they’ve released their official DualSense Firmware Update Tool.

• Ready to become the overlord of others in Stellaris? You’re going to get your chance when Stellaris: Overlord releases officially on May 12, 2022.

• This is a full expansion too, not just some little pack. Not only that but the latest free update version 3.4 “Cepheus” is launching at the same time. This free update will bring plenty of new content and improvements for all players worked on by their “Custodian Team”.

• While it’s not quite ready just yet to be a one-click install, the game manager Lutris is at least now available with various improvements as a Flatpak Beta.

• The what: the point of Lutris is to bring together many different launchers (Steam, Epic Games, Origin, GOG, Ubisoft), along with support for running games through Wine and Emulation too.

• Despot’s Game: Dystopian Army Builder is a rogue-like tactics army battler that I was absolutely in love with when it first entered Early Access and now on the Steam Deck I love it all over again.

• You build up a little army of fleshy people and equip them with all sorts of weird combinations like: a bow and arrow, a sword stuck in stone, a rabbit in a hat, a stale pretzel, an American football and the list of weird weapons goes on and on. When ready, you run through dungeons room by room and face off against various robotic creations (and other horrors) while your people auto-battle. It’s thoroughly odd but really engrossing to play through.

• It’s closing in on the 1.0 release, and a new update rolled out recently which amongst other things, added in controller / gamepad support. Naturally, I took it for a spin on the Steam Deck and apart from some tutorial quirks, it feels really great to play on it. Can easily see this getting a Deck Verified rating once it’s more polished.

• At some point, Valve quietly tweaked the specifications for the upcoming official Steam Deck Dock and it’s actually better than what they said originally. We still don’t even know exactly when it will be out, and they likely want to improve the overall docked experience first as there’s quite a few quirks (especially in desktop mode).

• Just like they did with some earlier games, Wolfire Games have now open sourced the game code for Overgrowth. What is it? Overgrowth is a 3D martial arts action-adventure featuring giant rabbits — jump, kick, throw, and slash your way to victory.

• You will still need to own a copy of the game, as the open source release does not include the data files, which is a great way for developers to support the open source community (and enable their game to live on forever pretty much) while also continue to earn from it easily.

• Rocket Bot Royale is a brand new release from developer Winterpixel Games that seems to be what you get if you took Worms, turned it into a Battle Royale and turned everyone into a tank.

• It’s ridiculously frantic. With both solo and group play, everyone starts off in the helicopter that flies into that map and then just like other BR games, you get to pick where you pop out. Quite hilarious actually and really fast-paced, so games don’t last particularly long so it’s a great coffee-break game too. Your tanks can climb up walls, rocket-jump and more. It’s last tank standing, with a map that gradually gets smaller due to rising water levels.

• Gaming on Chromebooks has become quite common nowadays. Back in the day though, it was inconceivable to say “Chromebook” and “Games” in the same sentence, even though Android apps had graced the OS years prior. With the advent of cloud gaming, however, AAA titles like Destiny, Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order, and more are now just a website URL away.

• If you’re an old-school gamer like me though, you’ll always have a fondness in your heart for simple games from your youth like Tetris, Space Invaders, and more. Heck, when I was growing up and in middle and high school, I even played a ton of Sudoku once the craze began in the early 2000s in the United States. The only difference is that this was only done in the newspaper or in books.

• Lumencraft, a recent Early Access release from 2Dynamic Games that offers up Native Linux support powered by Godot Engine seems to have been a hit.

• Want to find out what it’s like to travel in a submarine on another planet? Barotrauma gives you that option and it can be total chaos. It’s a 2D co-op survival horror inspired by the likes of FTL, RimWorld, Space Station 13 and others like that. With silly ragdoll physics, and plenty of strange creatures waiting for you.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• It’s a sunny day and you boot up your PC, which uses Xfce, ready to do some file-organizing. You open Thunar and suddenly you realise something. All this time you would have prefered sorting to be case-sensitive. You open the Preferences Dialog but alas, there is no relevant setting. You are left disappointed, hoping that Thunar devs add this option in a future release. You might even create a feature request.

• Little do you know, Thunar does have a preference to enable this functionality but it is hidden away. You can only find it in the wiki and even that is not a guarantee because we might forget about updating the wiki. Then you have to go and manually enable it in the Settings Editor or using xfconf-query.

• Thunar is not the only Xfce application that has hidden settings, Terminal is another prominent application that has preferences that don’t showup in its preferences dialog.

Distributions

•  If you don’t like the idea of setting up an Arch-based desktop by yourself, check out XeroLinux, a beautiful, easy-to-install variant of Arch Linux.

• The Linux kernel has spawned tons of operating systems that you can use for various purposes. From Ubuntu to Kali Linux, every Linux OS delivers something different to the users.

• Distros like Arch Linux offer complete control to the user in terms of customization. However, it may be a challenge for beginners to set up an Arch system. Therefore, TechXero brings a whole new operating system called XeroLinux to ease the process of setting up an Arch-based desktop on their machine.

• I am always looking to making the app collection builtin to EasyOS to be as complete as possible, to satisfy 99% of users.

• Today I was thinking that one gap is a webcam viewer. There are two GTK-based contenders, Cheese and GUVCView. The latter is smaller yet looks pretty full-featured.

BSD

• The OpenBSD Project has released version 7.1 of its eponymous OS for 13 different computer architectures, including Apple’s M1 Macs.

• OpenBSD is the security-focused member of the BSD family. Project leader Theo de Raadt co-founded the NetBSD project in 1993, but after disagreements with other core team members, he left and forked the NetBSD 1.0 codebase, releasing OpenBSD 1.2 in 1996. As a generalization, OpenBSD focuses on robustness and security, NetBSD focuses on supporting as many different platforms as possible, and FreeBSD focuses on providing a rich modern OS for the most popular platforms.

• Version 7.1 is the 52nd release since then, in which time only two remote holes have been found in the default installation.

• OpenBSD 7.1 has been released. The list of changes and new features is long, as usual; see the full text, below, for all the details.

SUSE/OpenSUSE

• As I skipped the review last week due to the prolonged Easter weekend, this week I will span over two weeks. In this period we have released 11 snapshots (0407…0415, 0419, and 0420). The Easter weekend was a bit slower, as a lot of people were absent. This showed even in the number of submit-requests incoming.

IBM/Red Hat/Fedora

• This is a weekly report from the CPE (Community Platform Engineering) Team.

• Red Hat’s AI cloud service platform almost didn’t happen. And all the benefits it provides—enabling a curated and supported Jupyter-as-a-service platform that IT operations can provide to their organization’s data scientists and intelligent application developers while still maintaining control—would not have been possible.

• Please join us at the next regular Open NeuroFedora team meeting on Monday 25 April at 1300 UTC The meeting is a public meeting, and open for everyone to attend.

• Checkmk provides a holistic view of all of your network interfaces to help you detect performance problems.

• “There is an emerging narrative about a growing intergenerational divide worldwide,” said a recent international survey conducted by The Changing Childhood Project. “In the media and in popular culture, the young are often portrayed as impatient, militant, outspoken, and even entitled, in contrast to more sober temperaments among older people. The concept of intergenerational tension is not new. What may be new, however, is the speed with which our world is changing – and with it, childhood.”

• The Changing Childhood Project is a collaboration between UNICEF, – the UN agency responsible for providing humanitarian and developmental aid to children around the world, – and Gallup, – the analytics company best known for its international opinion polls. Created to explore these intergenerational shifts, the project seeks to answer a few key questions: what is it like growing up today?; how do young people see the world differently?; and, is there an intergenerational gap?

• It is nearly impossible for organizations to be 100 percent compliant with their legal privacy obligations.

Debian Family

• There are new iso images of Sparky 2022.04 Special Editions: GameOver, Multimedia & Rescue ready to go.

• Sparky “GameOver” Edition features a lightweight desktop, a very large number of preinstalled games, useful tools and scripts. Built for gamers.

• Sparky “Multimedia” Edition uses a lightweight desktop environment and features a large set of tools for creating and editing graphics, audio, video and HTML pages.

• Sparky “Rescue” Edition is an operating system which works in a live DVD/USB mode only (no installation on a hard drive). The Live system contains a large set of tools for scanning and fixing files, partitions and operating systems installed on hard drives.

• There has been a flurry of activity on the Debian mailing lists ever since Steve McIntyre raised the issue of including non-free firmware as part of official Debian installation images.

• Firstly I should point out that I am in complete agreement with Steve’s proposal to include non-free firmware as part of an installation image. Likewise I think that we should have a separate archive section for firmware. Because without doing so it will soon become almost impossible to install onto any new hardware. However, as always the issue is more nuanced than a first glance would suggest.

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

• In a live Q&A to celebrate the recent Ubuntu 22.04 release Ubuntu’s founder was asked if the desktop edition of the OS would ever consider shipping with Flatpak support “out of the box”.

• And his answer was pretty terse: no.

• He has his reasons, of course.

• “I can say right now Flatpak’s wouldn’t work for us. I don’t think they have the security story and I also don’t think they have the ability to deliver the same integrity of execution over time that Snaps have ‘cos we built those things into Snaps.”

• Ubuntu 22.04 LTS brings more of everything you love about Ubuntu Desktop. More features and customisation options, more performance and power efficiency and more ways to integrate with your existing enterprise management tools. Combined with our LTS commitment of five years of updates and security patching, we’re confident that this latest version of the Linux Desktop delivers everything needed to empower developers and creators in 2022 and beyond.

• For those who have been faithful to our Focal Fossa over the last two years, this latest release delivers a significant upgrade. And those who’ve joined us on our journey via the interim releases- Groovy Gorilla, Hirsute Hippo and Impish Indri- will still find lots of new surprises in Jammy Jellyfish.

• Let’s take a look at some of our highlights.

• On April 22, 2022, the Ubuntu Kylin team officially released the new version 22.04 LTS.22.04 is the fifth Long Term Support (LTS) release after 14.04, 16.04, 18.04 and 20.04, and will officially provide technical support for 3 years.

• Looking for a lightweight Ubuntu distro for your computer as an alternative to GNOME-powered Ubuntu 22.04 LTS?

• Lubuntu 22.04 LTS is here as a replacement. In fact, you can also take a look at Xubuntu 22.04 LTS, if you are exploring lightweight options.

• Here, we focus on the most exciting changes with Lubuntu 22.04 LTS.

• Let’s take a quick look at the new Ubuntu 22.04 desktop.

• As we all know that Ubuntu 22.04 LTS is now officially available for the public. There are several distros that are based on Ubuntu and their release cycle depends upon the release cycle of Ubuntu. Out of many distros based on Ubuntu, Lubuntu is also one of them. Lubuntu is one of the official flavors of Ubuntu.

• Lubuntu 22.04 LTS will be supported for 3 years until April 2025. Lubuntu 22.04 is the 22nd release of Lubuntu. Lubuntu has LXQt as the default desktop environment.

• If you are a big fan of the Unity desktop environment then this must be good news for you as Ubuntu 22.04 LTS based on the Unity desktop environment is now available for download. Yes, you heard it right as Ubuntu Unity 22.04 LTS is now available for download. Ubuntu Unity is not affiliated with Canonical. Ubuntu Unity is not affiliated with Canonical. Unity desktop was abandoned since the Ubuntu 18.04 “Bionic Beaver” release in favor of the GNOME desktop.

• It seems like a weekend of the new release as various Linux distros based on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS are being released. In this lot of the new release, Ubuntu Cinnamon Remix 22.04 LTS is making its presence.

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

• Good news, Ubuntu 22.04 LTS “Jammy Jellyfish” just released yesterday! Now here’s a complete list of the download links for both Desktop and Server Editions. This includes all the Official Flavors from Kubuntu to Kylin. You can download by clicking the direct links just like usual. Thank you very much to Canonical! Happy downloading!

• Ubuntu is always not ready for use out-of-the-box, because every user has his/her own preferences. And, here’s a list of things I did after installing Ubuntu 22.04 LTS.

• Federal government organisations that either collect, store, share, transfer, or process sensitive data, as well as all federal agencies, their contractors, and service providers, are required to operate in high-security environments to ensure the safety of sensitive data such as Personally Identifiable Information or confidential information.

• Developing applications for regulated federal and high-security environments can be a challenging task due to the overwhelming number of compliance requirements developers need to conform to, like FIPS, FedRAMP, ITAR, DFARS, and many more.

• Making sure your physical and virtual infrastructure meets all these requirements is a difficult, time-consuming endeavor. Therefore, AWS GovCloud and Ubuntu Pro have been engineered to help take that complexity away so that you can increase developer productivity, concentrate on delivering great applications and take them to market more quickly.

Devices/Embedded

Open Hardware/Modding

• In celebration of Earth Day, we thought it would be fun to highlight a handful of open-source projects that may inspire you to help make a positive impact on our world. From air quality and water pollution monitoring to wildlife conservation and deforestation prevention, here are just some of the ways our community members are leveraging Arduino to come up with innovative solutions.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

•  Oracle is a computer technology corporation best known for its software products and services like Java.

• In 2020, Oracle was the second-largest software company in the world by revenue and market capitalization. They employ over 130,000 people, and sell cloud-engineering services and systems and database management systems.

• Oracle has a fairly prominent position with open source. They are a supporting member of the Linux Foundation, Cloud Native Computing Foundation, Eclipse Foundation, and the Java Community Process.

Events

• Bootlin CEO Thomas Petazzoni and COO Alexandre Belloni will both be attending the next Embedded Linux Conference North America, on June 21-24 in Austin, Texas.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• So you’ve washed your sheets and vacuumed under the couch in the name of spring cleaning. But what about your online clutter?

• Dayana’s primary focus will be supporting the mobile ecosystem, including Firefox for Android, Firefox for iOS, Firefox Focus (Android and iOS), as well as Firefox Klar. The role will initially emphasize support question moderation, including tagging and categorizing our inbound questions, and the primary support channels will be app reviews on iOS and Android. This will evolve over time, and we will be sure to communicate about these changes.

Content Management Systems (CMS)

•  A broad range of enterprises, including nonprofits, media and publishing, government agencies, education, and more, rely heavily on Drupal. But while Drupal is widely recognized as one of the most robust and flexible content management systems (CMS), it also has a reputation for being difficult to work with.

• Research conducted at a 2019 DrupalCon suggested that while experienced developers felt empowered and loved working with Drupal, novice users found it challenging to learn and work with. The Drupal community recognized that there was a serious need to improve the ease of use right from the moment you install Drupal.

Programming/Development

• Turning that into an application becomes an easier task when using a product like IAR Systems’ Visual State, which now runs on Windows and Linux. The new cross-platform hosting gives Linux-based programmers the ability to turn state-machine diagrams into code, thereby reducing coding errors due to translation.

Leftovers

• Eight years ago (wow! Has it been that long? [Yes. —Editor] [Who asked you? —Sean]) while in Brevard [1], I took a picture of some extreme lawn ornaments—life sized plastic cows [2]. I wrote the “eat moar chikin” image caption (if you hold your mouse over the image, it should pop up) because the cows reminded me of the cows used by Chick-fil-a [3].

• Somewhat recently, a very committed contributor to one of my open source projects noticed an issue when trying to import NVMe exported Targets from a Linux machine into a VMware ESXi host. It didn’t work. He was using version 7.0U3 which supposedly supports importing NVMe Targets over TCP. Quite some time was spent going down this rabbit hole.

• As the coronavirus spread across the world, all of my travel plans along with plans for a sabbatical had to be cancelled. During 2020, I only managed to go on two weekend trips to Prague and Budapest, followed by a two-weeks holiday on Crete (we returned just a couple of weeks before the infection numbers rose and lockdowns started). I do realise that a lot of people couldn’t even have this much because the situation in their countries was much worse — we were lucky to have had at least some travel.

• Fast forward to August 2021, I’m fully vaccinated, I — once again — have a UK visa for five years, and the UK finally recognises the EU vaccination passports — yay! I can finally go to Devon to see my mother and sister again. By train, of course.

• This has become my Friday ritual. Previously, I never really did have one which seems odd to me now. I can always break the ritual and often end up climbing or heading out for a gig or drinks. However, I can still do parts of the ritual and remove myself from the work thoughts.

Hardware

• My first self-designed functional 3D print is a replacement battery cover for a LED fake-candle that my daughter uses as a night-light.

• I measured the original cover (we have three of the candles) using a newly-purchased micrometer and tried to re-create it in OpenSCAD. I skipped the screw-hole that is for securing the cover as we don’t use that.

• Germany based Kontron, announced this week their new series of µATX motherboards that feature the 12th Gen Intel series processors (LGA1700 w/ 125W TDP) and Intel Pentium/Celeron processors. These devices are enabled to handle DDR5 memory, PCIe Gen5 and Intel’s latest LAN gen with 2.5 Gbit Ethernet.

• All the motherboards presented in this article come equipped with 2x M 2 connectors, integrated Intel TPM 2.0 (Win 11) and are robust enough to perform continuously in a 24/7 work environment.

• A few years ago, Apple made the controversial change to stop including chargers ad headphones in the box with new iPhones. Not only did this move upset customers, but Apple was sued for not including a charger, and the MagSafe Battery Pack that Apple sells instead wasn’t fast enough. Apple has now sped it up with a firmware update.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• I don’t know if I want to do weed again. It did feel good, absolutely, but the thing is, I took maybe two or three hits (i wasn’t sure how many i needed) and I’m still feeling the effects a whole 24 hours later. That’s probably not a good thing!

Integrity/Availability

Proprietary

Pseudo-Open Source

Privatisation/Privateering

Linux Foundation

• Microsoft’s decision to hand SONiC management to the Linux Foundation will likely spur feature development and industry support that could lead to more enterprise use of the open source network operating system, experts said.

Security

• Security updates have been issued by Fedora (composer, golang-x-crypto, rubygem-nokogiri, wavpack, xen, and xz) and SUSE (dnsmasq, openjpeg, swtpm, tomcat, and xen).

• The vulnerability, which Oracle patched on Tuesday, affects the company’s implementation of the Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm in Java versions 15 and above. ECDSA is an algorithm that uses the principles of elliptic curve cryptography to authenticate messages digitally.

• Unlike other software behemoths such as Microsoft, Adobe and Google, who produce official security updates once a month, thus following a schedule that is both regular and frequent, Oracle has historically and resolutely stuck to just four scheduled updates a year.

• Researchers at Forescout discovered a mechanism to stop current versions of ALPHV ransomware from deploying on most Linux systems.

• The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has released a Flash report detailing indicators of compromise (IOCs) associated with attacks involving BlackCat/ALPHV, a Ransomware-as-a-Service that has compromised at least 60 entities worldwide.

Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt/Fear-mongering/Dramatisation

Environment

Wildlife/Nature

• In the future, you may have a squid to thank for your coffee staying hot on a cold day. Drawing inspiration from cephalopod skin, engineers at the University of California, Irvine invented an adaptive composite material that can insulate beverage cups, restaurant to-go bags, parcel boxes and even shipping containers.

Civil Rights/Policing

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• When reaching a website, most web browsers will send a header (some metadata about the requestion) informing the web server that you supported compressed content. In OpenBSD 7.1, the httpd web server received a new feature allowing it to serves a pre-compressed file of a requested file if the web browser supports compression. The benefits are a bandwidth usage reduced by 2x to 10x depending on the file content, this is particularly interesting for people who self-host and for high traffic websites.

• [...]

• This is for me a major milestone for using httpd in self-hosting and with static websites. We battle tested this change with the webzine server often hitting big news websites leading to many people visiting the website in a short time span, this drastically reduced the bandwidth usage of the server, allowing it to support more clients per second.

• The more I browse a small-net, the more I’m suffering from a lack of reliable search engines. We have several projects, which are aiming to build a search engine that could be the same as their big-net relatives. The truth is that they are not working too well. During the writing of this paragraph, I tried to search Gopher Lawn and Medusae Gemini Directory with them, and I failed. So the common result of current search engines is many entries in, what seems to be, random order. We are at the beginning of the path. It’s worth saying that during gathering answers about how Gophersphere was in the 90s’ one of the common answers was the problem with slow search engines!

• When I am getting unsatisfactory results I start to think about a better form of a query string. Maybe that search engines are good, but it’s some lack of my skill causing lots of random entries. But probably they don’t, and it’s caused by too simple algorithms of the search engines or limitation of indexed content (for eg. only titles).

Monopolies

• Yesterday, Public Knowledge filed comments in response to the Federal Trade Commission and Department of Justice’s Request for Information seeking comment on merger guidelines as the agencies work to modernize antitrust law enforcement. The Horizontal Merger Guidelines were last updated in 2010. Public Knowledge previously filed comments with the FTC on vertical merger guidelines in 2020. The agency’s new merger guidelines would replace both the vertical and horizontal guidelines previously published.

• The comments highlight several unique features of dominant digital platforms and urge special scrutiny for mergers in the space. The comments call for a focus on protecting potential and nascent competition as well as the importance of presumptions for efficient use of enforcement resources and predictability. Public Knowledge looks forward to the publication of new draft guidelines incorporating public interest feedback and more effective merger enforcement in the future.

Copyrights

• The Lumen Project’s database houses copies of millions of content removal requests originally sent to online service providers. These copies form the foundation for a wealth of research related to, among other topics, illegitimate attempts at chilling online free speech.

• Between June 2019 and January 2022, the Lumen Database received copies of almost 34,000 notices that appear to be deliberate fraudulent attempts to misuse the DMCA notice-and-takedown process. In this post, I will discuss certain features of the notice set, including how I assessed them to be fraudulent, the likely motivation behind this abuse of DMCA and the potential impact of such organized takedown attempts.

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