● 06.12.22

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 12/06/2022: Libinput 1.21.0, KDE Frameworks 5.95.0, postmarketOS 22.06, MenuLibre 2.3.0, and MakuluLinux Shift 2022

Posted in News Roundup at 4:46 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

• I’ve been using Arch for a few years and it’s a great distro however it’s not the distro for everyone regardless of what some people shilling the distro might say, so here’s the case against Arch Linux.

• Unleash the open source hacking toolkit that’s just waiting for you to discover at the heart of every distro. From the basics of ping to the intricacies of nmap, we explore how you can hone your network hacking skills and take advantage of dedicated toolkits.

• PLUS: Fully feature CMS tested, Linux in space, build smart ESPhome devices, get started with Portainer and Docker, emulate the Commodore 16, get to grips with FreeCAD and more!

Desktop/Laptop

• I am using a ThinkPad T530 laptop, which I bought brand new. It was shipped with Windows 7, but from the first time, I installed Ubuntu. I’m using this OS from the beginning of Ubuntu distribution and my everyday GNU/Linux usage. There were two laptops before this Thinkpad. The last one is now ten years old, and it let me down almost two years ago. It shook the entire look on GNU/Linux of my own. Because after the last upgrade to Ubuntu 20.04 LTS it failed all the way.

Audiocasts/Shows

• First up in the news, NTFS is orphaned, a hare-brained C alternative, and some new Pop!

• In security and privacy, Microsoft found it, and Musk open sources

• Then in our Wanderings, Jorge is steaming right along, Joe is destroying more stuff, Norbert had a little too much linux, Moss is redoing EVERYTHING, and Bill is pulling his hair out.

• This week’s episode of Destination Linux, we’re going to be talking about some amazing things happening with mobile on Linux. Then we will be discussing some enhancements to FWUPD for easy firmware updates. Plus, we have our tips/tricks and software picks. All this and more coming up right now on Destination Linux to keep those penguins marching!

Kernel Space

Applications

• Adding (or fixing) support for the MATE desktop environment proved to be a challenge. Due to some incompatibility been gnome-menus, xdg-desktop-menu, MATE, and probably something that MenuLibre is doing wrong with all three… MenuLibre was failing to read the MATE directories which resulted in an always-empty menu structure. Getting past that, I found that some updates such as renaming menu items would either fail to update the menu or add duplicate directories.

Instructionals/Technical

• Whether you are a Linux beginner user who wants to learn new commands or a frequent user who only needs a quick reminder, this tutorial is for you.

• In this article we’ll explain 12 typical commands to check Linux system and hardware information.

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Persepolis on Debian 11. For those of you who didn’t know, Persepolis is a free, open-source download manager written in Python. It delivers an excellent download queuing and scheduling solution. Additionally, you can rely on it for multi-segment downloads from Dailymotion, Vimeo, and many more. Persepolis is available for Linux, Windows, macOS, and BSD.

• This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of the Persepolis download manager on a Debian 11 (Bullseye).

• After using Ubuntu 22.04 LTS for a long time, it’s time to move to Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (Jelly Fish) to use the new features that have created a lot of hype.

• In particular, Gnome 42 has a considerable amount of features, which pushes me to update and try the latest version of Ubuntu 22.04 LTS.

• Once I updated my system to Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, I started to configure the desktop environment as per my preference. While making the change, I found that the gnome tweak tool does not have the extensions option. Because of that, I’m not able to tweak the default option of a particular extension.

• Because I’m a terrible person, I themed my beloved WindowMaker to look like Windows 10. Because it’s fun and possible, somehow.

• To get more details on how to tune WindowMaker, refer to this theming article or to the official WindowMaker User Guide . This post only shows and references the minimal material.

• Want to display your computer’s temperature, voltage, fan speed, memory usage, and other system resources usage in top panel? Vitals is a good choice for Ubuntu, Fedora Workstation, and other Linux with GNOME desktop.

• This step-by-step guide shows best practices to upgrade your Ubuntu 20.04 LTS server to 22.04 LTS using the command line.

• On April 21, 2022, Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (Jammy Jellyfish) was officially released. This is the most recent Ubuntu LTS release, with security fixes and updates available until April 2027.

• Suppose you still use the previous LTS version of Ubuntu Server, 20.04 (Focal Fossa). In that case, you should consider switching to the most recent LTS version to take advantage of its new features and updated software packages.

• Firstly, login to root user in our terminal, then we install flatpak, then we add the flathub repository to our system and lastly we install Blender. Then we reboot our computer and everything is done. Enjoy!

• Today we are looking at how to install Blender 3.2.0 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.

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Drupal on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Drupal is an open-source and one of the most popular PHP-based Content Management System (CMS) platforms for building personal blogs or big corporate websites. It has great standard features, like easy content authoring, reliable performance, and excellent security. Flexibility and modularity are some of the core principles that set it apart from the rest.

• This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of the Drupal content management systems on Ubuntu 22.04 (Jammy Jellyfish). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 22.04 and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint, Elementary OS, Pop!_OS, and more as well.

• In 2021 I started using Emacs and learning to use the vanilla keybindings.

Games

• Here’s a quick round-up of what happened around the Steam Deck in the past 2 weeks.

• Someone has developed a Pokemon clone… that runs entirely from the command line: Pokete.

• Game engines offer huge benefits to game developers. The main functionality they provide is the library of core functions used in a computer game. This often includes a realtime rendering engine for 2D or 3D graphics, physics engine with collision detection, a character animation system, scene graph, sound, artificial intelligence, threading, networking, input, streaming localization support, debugging tools, integration with languages, and the provision of performance monitoring and optimization tools.

• Game engines play a crucial role in the fast creation and development of computer games. As they offer a collection of visual development tools, and are often presented in an integrated development environment, they vastly accelerate the development of games. Game engines are referred to as “game middleware” because they provide a flexible and reusable software platform.

• Let’s explore the 10 game engines. For each engine 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, together with links to relevant resources.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• KDE today announces the release of KDE Frameworks 5.95.0.

• KDE Frameworks are 83 addon libraries to Qt which provide a wide variety of commonly needed functionality in mature, peer reviewed and well tested libraries with friendly licensing terms. For an introduction see the KDE Frameworks release announcement.

• This release is part of a series of planned monthly releases making improvements available to developers in a quick and predictable manner.

•  KDE Frameworks 5.95 is here with mostly bug fixes, but also various improvements. For example, it improves the generation of previews for various RAW image types, addresses a major memory leak in the Plasma Wayland session, and makes the animation for progress bars and sliders in QtQuick-based apps much smoother.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• For a simple, straight-forward way to generate two factor authentication codes on Ubuntu and other Linux desktops try Authenticator.

• Created by developer Bilal Elmoussaoui, ‘Authenticator‘ is a GTK app you can use to get secure two-factor authentication codes to use with more than 200 providers, including GitHub, Microsoft, Twitter, Facebook, Google, and Dropbox.

• And if you want to know if this apps supports a particular service before you install it search for it on the 2fa.directory. If a service listed on that website supports ‘software tokens’ then it will work with it.

• In this post I take a quick look at what two-factor authentication is, why it’s (highly) recommended, and how Authenticator makes using the codes it creates seriously simple.

Distributions and Operating Systems

•  Ventoy 1.0.76 is the latest release of this powerful and beloved multiboot USB creator, which finally enables the Secure Boot support option by default when installing Ventoy on your USB flash drive. In addition, this release improves key enrolling for Secure Boot with Super UEFIinSecureBoot Disk 3-3.

• In addition, the new release adds support for the recently launched EasyOS 4.0 experimental GNU/Linux distribution based on various Puppy Linux technologies, along with support for resizing the EasyOS partition during the first boot.

New Releases

• We are proud to announce the Final Build of MakuluLinux Shift 2022. Its been a long journey and putting together such a complex/unique distro has been very challenging. MakuluLinux Shift is a transformable Linux operating system that can transform between 16 desktops with a single click, and it takes just seconds for the process to complete. It transforms the whole Desktop including Panels, Docks, Menus, Wallpapers, Themes, Icon-sets, Extensions, Cursors Effects, Color schemes and even scripts that handle third party applications and menu entries, It is a truly Unique Distro, nothing like it exists anywhere.

Debian Family

• The volunteer response to the Debian trademark case at WIPO (download PDF) contains some stunning revelations. We will serialize them over the next couple of weeks. One of the most fascinating revelations is that Debian went broke in 1998. Bruce Perens promised to put the trademark into the public domain, in other words, giving it to the real community. Who is the real community?

• Normally a dispute like this would be resolved by private discussions between grown ups and these emails would never see the light of day. Jonathan Carter has told us that he can just give a whole lot of money to a lawyer and get whatever he wants. Those are the words of a bully who doesn’t look volunteers in the eye, much like his predecessor Chris Lamb.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

• As we learned last winter, taking six weeks for following up on Alpine’s November release isn’t ideal. While some free software hackers prefer to hack on their favorite projects during the holidays, others take their well deserved break far away from computers. We got it done regardless, and planned to cut the release schedule in half to have it easier next time. The v22.06 release right here was the trial run for the new schedule… and we made it. Here it is, only three weeks after Alpine Linux 3.16 dropped and still properly tested: the postmarketOS v22.06 release!

• v22.06, like previous releases, is geared mainly towards Linux enthusiasts; it may be a bit rough around the edges so expect some bugs. Help identifying and resolving issues is always greatly appreciated.

•  Coming five and a half months after postmarketOS 21.12, which received no less than five service packs that brought minor improvements and bug fixes, the postmarketOS 22.06 is here to celebrate the project’s 5th anniversary as a major release with several new features, support for new devices, and updated UIs.

• The biggest new feature in the postmarketOS 22.06 release is the fact that upgrades from previous releases are now finally possible. That’s a huge change actually as you no longer have to reflash postmarketOS to get a new release.

• A new Manjaro Phosh Beta, videos about Phosh on tablets and its upcoming gestures, and another Ubuntu Touch Q&A!

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

Content Management Systems (CMS)

• I decided to do a little bit of automation on my blogs. I now create “blog.gmi” using the following script…

• A new, more secure, server has been set up to host my gemini account.

Programming/Development

• I’ve enjoyed writing software for 40+ years now. Lots of activities fall into that “writing software” basket, and here’s my favorite: When you have a body of code with a decent unit-test suite and you need to make it go faster.

• Years ago I remember reading that backups must be automatic to be useful. As soon as you rely on a manual process to perform tedious but necessary jobs, our squishy human brains will forget, and we will lose data. In the words of chief engineer Thomas Andrews as portrayed in James Cameron’s Titanic, it’s a mathematical certainty.

• (It’s funny that his quotes are all I remember from that movie, even after all these years. I assure you sir, she’s made of iron).

• I’m starting to see parallels to this everywhere. And I take it a step further: something not quite as good, efficient, or even affordable still beats the pants off something manual, especially if one has a life outside that particular thing.

Standards/Consortia

• Steven P. Spackman allegedly once observed that “flat text is just never what you want.” Which, I guess, is true: half the historical advances in computing have come from figuring out ways to tart up plain text, whether embedding control codes or out-of-band styling or in-band markup. However, with the exception of out-of-band styling (I always liked the Macintosh text file formats that kept the text in the data fork and the styling in a resource), you still needed to parse the file or at best you’d get blocks of text separated by gobbledygook. Enhanced text formats like Markdown were thus designed to make cognitive sense to human eyes without further parsing — but also encoding sufficient metadata to facilitate improved ways of rendering the document.

• Markdown circa 2004 has displaced most of the others today, but it explicitly never claimed to be the first such human-readable format; indeed, AsciiDoc predates it by about two years, reStructuredText a year before that and MakeDoc about a year before that. For that matter, some of the concepts popularized in Markdown might not have existed at all were it not for earlier ancestors like 2002′s Textile.

• But a forgotten rich text language predates most of these, with the interesting property in that much of the markup is encoded using trailing whitespace, almost a fusion of in-band and out-of-band styling systems. If the whitespace is munged, it’s largely just a text document (like those particular Mac files if you pass along only the data fork); but if it passes through intact, an intelligent converter can use attributes encoded in the whitespace to style it into HTML. That system is ProleText.

Leftovers

• Observation: Amazon’s sole advantage is that it ships stuff fast, but the quality of what you find and price of the stuff that you find isn’t that much cheaper than buying stuff second hand from a site such as Ebay, where you typically filter by location.

• But here’s the thing, and this is why I think this idea is valuable: Let’s call out those obstacles as the actual obstacles.

• Let’s acknowledge that the primary way to succeed is to perfectly emulate those who are succeeding. Copy everything. We don’t know what works. Use the same damn toothbrush. Walk the same on the sidewalk. Copy what works. And if life prohibits us from doing that, then that’s what we need to change.

• So last week, after much deliberation, bought an inflatable board, paddle and various other accessories, and on Saturday went to try it out, on excellent weather (completely flat) and hot but not overly so. The board choosing in itself was something I like to do (research options), so for a bit I was concerned whether I’m more interested in the gear, or the actual paddling itself…

• [...]

• And hour later, and my initial shakiness went away, with the trainings slowly coming back to mind. Another half hour, and – for completely flat water – I felt quite confident. The view was awesome, the weather nice, the water cold enough to be refreshing… and the only question on my mind was – why didn’t I do this 2, 3 years ago? Well, Corona aside.

Science

• We visualize children reference populations for height, weight and body mass index by plotting percentiles of the population as a function of age. Besides the epidemiological interest in these anthropometric curves, they have dual-use potential for reproducible birthday cards.

Hardware

• I installed a new Midea air-conditioner. It’s an amazing device, and any praise I give it is insufficient. It’s amazingly quiet, comes with great mounting hardware, looks fabulous, and works better than I could possibly imagine. It also comes with the worst remote control in the world.

• I am a grouch, so when you hear me praising something, you know it’s good.

• [...]

• First of all, why does every fan and lightbulb need its own remote? Are we so ****ing lazy that we can’t get off our butt twice a day and walk over to the window?

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• After more than two years of successfully dodging it, COVID-19 finally hit my family the week. On Tuesday my wife woke up with a migraine, which isn’t unusual for her; on Wednesday morning, she woke up with a low (100.4°F fever) and we belatedly realized that she might be sick. She took an antigen test1 and the TEST line turned blue basically instantly.

• Shit.

• Quarantine ensued. Isaac (our son) has been home from school2 and we’ve all been cooped up on the property for the past few days.

• So far, Isaac and I have continued to be symptom-free and testing negative on antigen tests. I also got one PCR 3 (so far) which was negative. We’ve been trying to isolate as much as possible, but Eva and I both have full-time jobs, and Isaac can’t go back to day care until this nightmare is over, so there’s only so much we can do — we also have a relatively small house which doesn’t have any tightly-closing inside doors. Both of us adults have been wearing N95 masks whenever awake, and we have HEPA air purifiers4 running in whatever rooms we happen to be occupying.

Security

Privacy/Surveillance

• Meta Platforms Inc. will not make its upcoming augmented reality glasses available to consumers as originally planned, according to two reports published on Thursday. Meta originally intended to make its AR glasses available to developers and early technology adopters.

Defence/Aggression

• A select committee of the US House of Representatives Thursday held its first public hearing regarding the January 6th attack on the US Capitol, releasing previously unseen footage from the attack.

• The Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the US Capitol broadcasted its proceedings on primetime television. The hearing included the testimonies of Capitol Police officer Caroline Edwards and documentary filmmaker Nick Quested, who was filming the far-right Proud Boys leading up to and during the attack.

• The hearing opened with video of Trump campaign officials giving statements to committee investigators, testifying that Trump directed them to find evidence of fraud during the 2020 presidential election. Some officials, including former Attorney General William Barr, told Trump that they could not find any evidence of fraud or that any fraud that may have occurred would not have changed the outcome of the election.

Finance

• Two cybersecurity vendors that recently boasted of raising hundreds of millions of dollars at unicorn valuations have confirmed staff cuts as the turmoil in the capital markets start to wreak havoc on late-stage startups.

• The two vendors — OneTrust and Cybereason — banked a combined $575 million since 2020 and have deliberately boasted about billion-dollar valuations in an expanding cybersecurity market. Now, with macro economic headwinds on the front-burner, the layoffs and pre-emptive belt-tightening at these two well capitalized startups suggest the industry could be in for a long economic slog.

• The Consumer Price Index (CPI) went up again in May. Over the last year, prices across the economy increased an average of 8.6 percent, up from 8.5 percent in April’s year-over-year reading. And yet, inflation might be starting to go down.

• The reason for the paradox is that CPI, which tracks price changes in a hypothetical basket of goods, can’t tell the difference between price increases due to monetary inflation and price increases due to other causes, such as supply shocks, regulations, or changes in supply and demand. Inflation is what happens when the money supply grows faster than real economic output. The rule of thumb is that if it isn’t monetary, it isn’t inflation.

• May’s CPI increase was driven by large increases in energy (34.6 percent), food (10.1 percent), and vehicles (12.6 percent for new ones, 16.1 percent for used cars and trucks). Much of those price increases have little to do with inflation.

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

• The last reason — the claim published by Yahoo but never matched by another outlet that Pompeo responded to the initial Vault 7 release by asking about the possibility of assassinating Julian Assange — is a more dubious argument still.

Monopolies

• The U.K.’s antitrust regulator, the Competition and Markets Authority, today announced plans to investigate Apple Inc. and Google LLC over their business practices in the mobile app ecosystem.

• The CMA is launching multiple investigations focused on three different areas. Officials plan to scrutinize the market power that Apple and Google possess in the mobile browser market. Additionally, the CMA will investigate Apple’s business practices in the cloud gaming market, as well as the restrictions that Google imposes on in-app payments.

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