● 06.04.22

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 04/06/2022: Tails 5.1 Finally Out

Posted in News Roundup at 3:45 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Server

• A startup called Kubecost, officially known as Stackwatch Inc., today announced the launch of a promising new open-source project that provides companies with tools around Kubernetes cost monitoring and optimization, as well as standardized methodologies for tracking those costs.

• The initiative is called OpenCost and it has some pretty big backers, with the likes of Amazon Web Services Inc., Google LLC, Adobe Inc., D2iQ Inc., New Relic Inc. and SUSE SE all named as contributors.

Audiocasts/Shows

• 1:19 Linux Innards 38:41 Check This Out 41:09 Announcements

• In our Innards section we discuss our free and open source alternatives for proprietary software.

Instructionals/Technical

• Have you forgotten the FreeBSD root user password? Worry not! This brief guide explains the procedure to reset or recover root user password in FreeBSD.

• This guide is officially tested on FreeBSD 10.2, and FreeBSD 13.1 versions.

• To deal with the attendance system finger is more effective than card reading technology. In this work, the fingerprint sensor with Arduino performs enrollment and recognition of attendance

• In this tutorial, the fingerprint sensor interfaced with Arduino Uno, dealing with finger enrollment and utilization for attendance. This tutorial provides the coding, wiring diagram and component list.

• I have an application code maintained in the Github repository. Now our requirement is to create the documentation for that application and save them under a separate branch in the same repository. I simply tried to create a new branch but it linked to the main branch. After googling it, I found an option –orphan to create branch with no parents.

• This tutorial will help you to create a new empty branch in the Git repository.

• Learn the steps and commands to install Checkmk open source monitoring tool on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy JellyFish Linux server.

• You have a Scaleway Virtual Private Server (VPS) and you are considering upgrading your installed Linux distribution. Perhaps you have been notified by Scaleway to upgrade an old Linux version. The email asks you to upgrade but does not give you the necessary information on how to upgrade or how to avoid certain pitfalls.

• As you know, it’s not possible for an individual to sort out and remove duplicate lines from the file one by one, and literally, it will be very tedious work to do, so to rescue this, you have a special tool called “sort” and “uniq” in Linux, and from the name itself, you have realized what the purpose of this tool is. Apart from that, you will also learn how to use the awk command to find duplicate lines.

WINE or Emulation

• Building off yesterday’s release of Wine 7.10, Wine-Staging 7.10 is now available as the newest release of that experimental/testing flavor of Wine that ships with more than 500 extra patches.

Games

• Making the Steam Deck OS run on a standard PC is probably the most challenging part of the process. Although the Steam Deck OS is based on Arch-Linux, which is completely open-source, it has some strict hardware requirements to function correctly. To be specific, the Steam Deck OS only works with the custom-made AMD APU powering the device. The holoiso team has made the Steam Deck OS work on almost all computers but, in doing so, stripped away some of its features. Mainly, the OS won’t allow users to set the power limit or restrict the FPS in any particular game. Another feature that might not become available is probably the AMD FSR. Steam Deck offers AMD’s upscaling technology on a hardware level. So even if a game does not officially support AMD FSR, the Steam Deck can still allow users to enable it.

• As mentioned above, the Steam Deck APU and the upcoming AMD Mendocino APU are pretty similar in architecture. So there is a possibility that the Steam Deck OS could work without any caveat with an AMD Mendocino laptop. If this happens, then the computer would probably gain all the functionalities of the Steam Deck OS, including its powerful tools that offer direct hardware control. However, if that doesn’t happen, users can still run the Steam Deck OS on their AMD Mendocino laptops and enjoy its various other capabilities.

•  Computer games grow larger, more sophisticated and increasingly complex. Traditional blockbusters continue to dominate the commercial gaming market. However, for many people who have time and budget constraints, smaller open source computer games still offer an attractive alternative.

• If you’re a fan of PC gaming, there are a range of tools that help to improve the gaming experience. We feature an eclectic bunch of tools.

• Let’s explore the 10 utilities. For each utility we have compiled its own portal page, a full description with an in-depth analysis of its features, a screen shot of the program in action (where relevant), together with links to relevant resources.

• Hunting games are always fun and exciting as they give you the experience of a primitive age. While hunting wild animals, ghosts, or even people on the ships, you can feel adventure in the forest, sea, and haunted places. That’s why Hunting games are so addictive and popular. Well, many of you may have an idea that Linux doesn’t have any hunting game worth your try. But that’s a wrong idea for sure. You can find lots of exciting hunting games for Linux for sure.

Distributions and Operating Systems

Fedora Family / IBM

• AlmaLinux 9 is another major release to cater to the users who are missing the Long term support in CentOS. This is the new major version derived from Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) but with some bold steps to make it more popular among Desktop & Workstation users.

• AlmaLinux 9 arrives following the release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9, almost attached to it in time with all its new features at the system level.

• As per the release note, AlmaLinux 9 borrows all RHEL 9 updates, including performance optimizations and security improvements, applied, as well as new versions of components such as programming languages, frameworks, and other tools, focused on development. In this regard, AlmaLinux 9 adds new repositories for SAP and SAPHANA.

Debian Family

• This release fixes the security vulnerability in the JavaScript engine of Firefox and Tor Browser announced on May 24.

• This release was delayed from May 31 to June 5 because of a delay in the release of Tor Browser 11.0.14.

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

• Escuelas Linux 7.5 is here about four months after Escuelas Linux 7.3 based on the Linux 5.17 kernel series patched and distributed by Linux hardware vendor System76 for their Ubuntu-based Pop!_OS Linux distribution, which means that more devices, and built around the Moksha 0.3.4 desktop environment.

• Still working on Ubuntu 21.10? It’s time to upgrade to Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, because it will reach end of life in next month.

• Ubuntu 21.10, code-name “Impish Indri”, was released on October 14, 2021 as a short-term release with 9-month support.

• Support of this Ubuntu edition will end soon. At that time, there’s no longer package updates and security fixes. Also, Ubuntu PPAs, software developers, as well as other software sources will (or has already) stop updating for 21.10.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

Leftovers

• Not much bandwidth for personal computing these days. Since I’ve been back to work and working remote, the computer is not what I want to interface with after a work day. I’m still here, just haven’t been motivated to transmit.

Education

• A famous person once said; “Innovation is the outcome of a habit, not a random act.” That is what technology has done to the world; it made us recognise the power of consistency and focus.

• Excellence Anurika Joshua belongs to the crop of women who are making a difference in the world through technology, and lifting other women while at it. She is the founder of Techy Train incubator, a Nigerian-based onshore and offshore training and outsourcing organisation that specialises in equipping African young women and female entrepreneurs with digital skills to empower them to get jobs in their countries and to also maximise remote job opportunities around the world. This will help in reducing the gender wage gap and to also support capacity building among African companies and startups development worldwide.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• China’s largest city, Shanghai, will this week all-but end its COVID-19 lockdowns on Wednesday, and by doing so may smooth some of the kinks in the world’s technology supply chains.

• Limited lockdowns commenced in Shanghai during mid-March, before April escalations imposed city-wide restrictions that have remained in place ever since.

• Shanghai is a major manufacturing hub, so the lockdowns have caused considerable pain. Cisco, for example, Cisco warned of disruption to supplies of parts it needs for power supplies. The likes of Foxconn, Tesla, and Toyota, have all ceased or slowed production. Chinese chipmaker SMIC kept production ticking over by having staff move either into its plants, or into a COVID-free zone around its plants.

Security

• Many information security professionals have long known that passwords are a weak link in the security chain. For example, one in four breaches in 2021 utilized stolen passwords, according to the latest Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report.

• As America finds itself in conflict with Russia over Ukraine and at odds with China over its encroachment of Taiwan, the potential for a cyber conflict between the U.S. and its top rivals remains as great of a threat as ever.

• The New York City Department of Education (DOE) has decided to pull the plug on academic software company Illuminate Education after the third party vendor’s January data breach compromised the data of over 820,000 students.

Environment

• Over-pumping of San Joaquin Valley’s groundwater basins has caused the region’s surface to slowly collapse.

Finance

• She voted for Trump.

• [...]

• Today, the IRS and the Small Business Administration are monsters who lets the Batteries Asshole I spent all month fighting with, and two Indiana slumlords that I know about get away with whatever they want, while they mostly audit poor people, and largely people with children that need the Earned Income Credit.

• I’ve talked to Richard Stallman about this numerous times as he calls for a beefed up IRS.

• I’ve told him they need to modernize their systems to catch red flags on tax returns (they still use software written in COBOL during the Kennedy Administration), and they need to start prioritizing these rich assholes who consider gaming the system par for the course to get extra income above what they rip off their customers for.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Four years after starting Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg took his first proper holiday: a month-long solo backpacking trip through Europe and Asia. Among the stops, a remote Indian ashram that, not coincidentally, had been visited years before by Steve Jobs.

• The 24-year-old felt that he could finally take a breath because he had just hired a rock star executive, Sheryl Sandberg, to help turn his fledgling social network into a proper company. It may be difficult to conceptualise now, but back in 2008, Facebook was growing like a weed yet was still in search of a business model. So while Zuck communed with the spirit of the Apple founder, Sandberg got to work, thousands of miles away in Palo Alto, California, turning Facebook into an…

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• MY FIRST exposure to the internet was in two novels I read as a teenager: “Snowcrash” (1992) and “Neuromancer” (1984). They are set in dystopian visions of the future, where the power of technology has been co-opted to mostly control the population. But both feature independent, compelling protagonists who use their talents as hackers, digital natives, to save themselves, and a select group of those they care about.

• It was not hard to see myself as one of these cypherpunks, someone who cared about the privacy of everyone that wanted to use the internet. Someone who worried that corporations, if left unchecked, would turn us into digital serfs, just as authors Neal Stephenson and William Gibson had described.

• This was the ethos of the internet when I began to log on in the mid-90s, with a 28.8k dial-up modem and a terminal window. (For context, you can get a modem that’s more than 20,000 times faster for less than $100 today.) I quickly found people who shared my values, who had formed organizations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Free Software Foundation, the Creative Commons. I was young, but like all of them, I believed this new way to gather was too valuable to be left for commercial exploitation. We had to do what we could to preserve open standards and ensure the internet remained as public as possible.

Monopolies

• “Companies like Google and Facebook have been able to exploit their unprecedented troves of detailed user data to obtain vice grip-like control over digital advertising, amassing power on every side of the market and using it to block competition and take advantage of their customers. The conflicts of interest are so glaring that one Google employee described Google’s ad business as being like ‘if Goldman or Citibank owned the NYSE.’ This lack of competition in digital advertising means that monopoly rents are being imposed upon every website that is ad-supported and every company—small, medium, or large—that relies on internet advertising to grow its business,” US Senator Mike Lee remarked while introducing the Competition and Transparency in Digital Advertising (CTDA) Act on May 19 along with Senators Amy Klobuchar, Ted Cruz, and Richard Blumenthal (D-CT).

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