● 06.13.22

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 13/06/2022: Flatpak Brand Refresh

Posted in News Roundup at 6:11 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

• This week has been quite interesting as we got a few good releases and exciting news, starting with the release of the Cinnamon 5.4 desktop environment for the upcoming Linux Mint 21 “Vanessa” operating system series and continuing with the release of openSUSE Leap 15.4, Blender 3.2, as well as new LibreOffice 7.3 and KDE Gear 22.04 bugfix releases.

• On top of that, Linux phone users can now enjoy the awesome postmarketOS 22.06 release with all its goodies, Ubuntu users can now patch their systems against 35 Linux kernel vulnerabilities, and distrohoppers can now try the brand-new Debian-based SpiralLinux. You can enjoy these and much more in 9to5Linux’s Linux weekly roundup for June 12th, 2022, below!

• The Linux Release Roundup series summarizes the new distribution and application version releases in the past week. This keeps you informed of the latest developments in the Linux world.

Instructionals/Technical

• Learn the commands to install the Plex Client app on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy JellyFish or 20.04 Focal fossa using terminal.

• Plex Media Server doesn’t need any introduction, it has been quite popular among the netizens who want to set up their own personal Media server. However, the server part which is available to install on Windows, macOS, Linux (Ubuntu, Fedora, CentOS), and FreeBSD only offers a web client interface to access the media. This means whenever you want to access the media files stored on the Plex server, the users need a browser. However, to solve this problem we have a Plex client, available to install on almost all popular operating systems including NAS boxes.

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install WPS Office on AlmaLinux 9. For those of you who didn’t know, WPS Office is the perfect solution if you’re looking for a comprehensive office suite that can handle all your document processing needs. As a handy and professional office software, WPS Office allows you to edit files in Writer, Presentation, Spreadsheet, and PDF to improve your work efficiency.

• 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 WPS Office on AlmaLinux 9. You can follow the same instructions for CentOS and Rocky Linux.

• Make your code extremely versatile with JupyterLab, a server-client application for interactive coding in Python, Julia, R, and more.

• Sometimes combining different open source projects can have benefits. The synergy of using Terraform with TrueNAS is a perfect example.

• TrueNAS is an OpenBSD-based operating system that provides network-attached storage (NAS) and network services. One of its main strengths is leveraging the ZFS file system, which is known for enterprise-level reliability and fault tolerance. Terraform is a provisioning and deployment tool embodying the concept of infrastructure as code.

• We can use replace() method to replace any string or character with another in javascript. It searches for a defined string, character, or regular expression and replaces it. This method doesn’t change the original string but it returns the updated string as result.

• All the commands get stored by the shell interpreter: Find where it is stored, how to make it useful, and clear the history data if there’s something you don’t want to save in the record.

• Every time you execute a command in your terminal app (GNOME Terminal, Konsole, etc.), you will get the result without knowing that your interpreter, hiding behind the terminal, captures every executed command.

• There are multiple famous Linux interpreters, such as bash, zsh, fish, etc., with the feature of capturing user-executed commands into a specific file known as history.

• VirtualBox is a cross-platform virtualization software that allows users to run multiple guest operating systems on a single host machine. VirtualBox uses a hypervisor to virtualize the guest operating system, which means that each guest operating system has its own virtual environment in which it runs.

• In this article, we’ll provide a step-by-step guide to install VirtualBox on Fedora Linux. At time of writing this article, latest Fedora version is Fedora 36. So, we have used Fedora 36 in this article..

• If you are transitioning from other operating system environments to Linux, the first puzzle you are most likely to face is understanding the Linux file system. To be more specific, you have to understand how Linux labels its hard disk drives (whether internal or external).

• On a Windows operating system, this step is straightforward as all the disk drives connected to the operating system environment are identified by relatable labels like C:, D:, F: etc. In most cases, it is the disk drive labeled C: that hosts the installed copy of the Windows operating system.

• One of the brilliant aspects of Portainer container management system is that it allows you to add multiple environments, which can then be assigned to different teams. With that setup, you might have one team given access to the local environment for development, one team might have access to an Azure environment for deployment, and yet another team might have access to an Edge agent.

• When most developers and admins think about deploying, managing, and working with Docker containers, the first thing they consider is the command line. After all, Docker was originally created as a command-line tool and there’s nothing you cannot do with Docker from the CLI (Command Line Interface). The Docker CLI is fast, flexible, and available on any machine that supports the Docker runtime engine. And given how many work with containers from third-party cloud hosts that don’t generally provide GUI tools for container environments, it makes perfect sense to manage your deployments from the command line.

• But not every admin, developer, and user prefers the command line. Sure, when first learning the ins and outs of Docker, you should certainly start with the command line. After all, there is no better way to educate yourself on how containers are deployed and managed than with the CLI. Even still, when you are incredibly busy, the command line tools can get a bit unwieldy. On top of this, some advanced Docker features can get a bit cumbersome when used from the command line.

• Portainer is one of the most powerful Docker (and Docker Swarm) managers on the market. With this tool, you can create and manage every aspect of your container deployments, including the management of services, networks, images, registries, volumes, configs, stacks, orchestration, and even secrets.

Games

• Downslope is a recent indie game that was released with a native Linux client. We noticed it back in January 2022 in our native Linux releases feature, and I decided to try it out. The concept is fairly straightforward: you are a snowboarder (seen from the top, top-down scroller, 3D) and start at the top of a mountain, intending to go down all the way.

• Each stage is a matter of getting from the top to the bottom of a small section of the mountain. The first few levels act as a tutorial, where you go through almost empty snowy landscapes, just to get to know the controls. Progressively, the game adds a few rocks here and there, making you avoid the obstacles. Not too long after that, in a short cutscene you end up meeting with a ghost… first just one, and a few later on. These ghosts were skiers who died on the very same mountain in the past. They seem to have some kind of history too: maybe their deaths were not purely accidental, since one keeps a grudge against the other. Whenever they appear in a stage, you need to reach the bottom before a countdown reaches zero. If you can’t, the spirit of the ghost catches up with you and kills you instantly.

Distributions and Operating Systems

Red Hat / IBM

• Flatpak has been at the center of the recent app renaissance, but its visual identity has remained fairly stale.

• Without diverging too much from the main elements of its visual identity we’ve made it more contemporary. The logo in particular has been simplified to work in all of the size scenarios and visual complexity contexts.

• The recent launch of Merlin, a Linux-based collection of tools for creating next-gen IBM i applications, has raised questions about the future of IBM i. One of the questions has to do with IBM i’s relationship with Linux, and whether it will have to be become more like Linux to survive. Just like IBM i had to become more like Unix and Windows Server, in many ways, to survive.

• Merlin is a different sort of product than what IBM typically ships. For starters, it isn’t a modernization tool per se, but more like a collection of tools that allow IBM i customers to begin developing IBM i applications using modern DevOps methods. It’s a framework, if you will, that today includes a Web-based IDE, connectors for Git and Jenkins, and impact analysis and code conversion software OEMed from ARCAD Software. And in the future, Merlin will have even more goodies, including possibly an app catalog, PTF management, security capabilities, and more integrations with tools from third-party vendors.

• Merlin is also unique in how IBM chose to deliver it. Instead of making this software all native, Big Blue wants it to run in the same modern manner in which the wider IT world runs stuff, which means containers.

• Merlin runs only in a container. In fact, it runs only in containers managed by Kubernetes, and the only Kubernetes distribution it supports is IBM’s own Red Hat OpenShift. What’s more, all Kubernetes runs on Linux, which makes Merlin a Linux app at the end of the day. Google, which created the Borg workload and container scheduler, the origination of Kubernetes, to simplify the massive workloads running in its cloud datacenters, and which open sourced a layer of Borg as Kubernetes in 2014, didn’t develop Kubernetes to be able to run on other operating systems – not Windows, not Unix, and certainly not IBM i.

• [...]

• While Kubernetes isn’t going to run on IBM i, and IBM i isn’t going to morph into a version of Linux, the platforms can still work closely together, especially with OpenShift running directly on Power (although Merlin also will run on Red Shift on X86.

• The key to getting them work closely together and making life easier for the customer is delivering a management layer that can work with both IBM i and Kubernetes. That management layer is Ansible, according to Steve Sibley, vice president of Power Systems offering management at IBM.

• “We see bringing those closer together and simplifying how it’s put together and managed by the customer as the way to do that,” Sibley told IT Jungle in an interview at POWERUp 2022. “The way you bring it closer is to make the ability to manage the environment simpler. For instance, we talk about Ansible as a key management capability. It really is bringing Linux closer to i. It’s about bringing the i platform into a customers’ overall management environment. They can use the exact same Ansible platform to manage both their i platform as well as their Linux on Power as well as their Linux on X86 environments.”

• IBM i isn’t going to run Kubernetes and it’s not going to become Linux. But it will sit right next to them, enabling IBM i applications and customers to integrate with them to the greatest extent possible. Will be enough to ensure IBM i’s continued relevance and survival in a world dominated by containerized microservices running in the cloud? Only time will tell.

• In a very funny way, the licensing of the IBM i platform is coming full circle with the advent of subscription pricing – with some funny curlicues along the way with over three decades of software licensing history and an even longer history of Big Blue renting, rather than selling, its software. When IBM first delivered its punch card machines, way way back, they were only available for rent, not for sale. The long arm of the law taught IBM to have some optionality, and it thus sold mainframes and minicomputers as well as leasing and renting them.

• Volume gets a lot of the press when it comes to data. Size is right there in the once-ubiquitous term “Big Data.”

• This isn’t a new thing. Back when I was an IT industry analyst, I once observed in a research note that marketing copy placed way too much emphasis on the bandwidth numbers associated with big server designs, and not enough on the time that elapses between a request for data and its initial arrival – which is to say the latency.

• We’ve seen a similar dynamic with respect to IoT and edge computing. With ever-increasing quantities of data collected by ever-increasing numbers of sensors, surely there’s a need to filter or aggregate that data rather than shipping it all over the network to a centralized data center for analysis.

• Software never really changes. It is, as Capitol Canary CTO Mikhail Opletayev put it recently, “a set of instructions that tells computers what to do.”

• Software development – how people write and deliver those instructions – changes regularly, on the other hand. Certain principles stay more or less the same over time, but many facets of how software gets made – languages and libraries, methodologies, tools, packaging, testing, and so forth – continuously evolve.

• With that, the realities of what it means to build and operate software – and what it means to build and lead a software development team – have likewise shifted. Let’s examine five modern software development realities that successful IT leaders understand.

• Recently, I have been working on enabling cooperation between SystemTap (a kernel profiling tool) and gprof (a tool that makes graphs from program profiles). This exercise has given me insight into meaningful topics only briefly touched upon at my university, such as kernel space, user space, and virtual memory. But these concepts are fundamental to the proper and safe execution of programs on any modern operating system. The trade off is some address translation when viewing memory from kernel space versus user space. In this article, you’ll see how that translation can be handled.

• Things are moving quickly now in the IBM i development world, particularly when it comes to lightweight, Web-based IDEs, such as IBM’s new Merlin. However, the need to debug programs and the lack of a debugger for these IDEs is causing a bit of a roadblock to developer productivity with these newer IDEs. That’s why IBM is seeking a way to get IBM i debugging capabilities into more people’s hands.

• The official IBM i Debugger product is bundled as a JAR file with IBM Toolbox for Java, and is directly integrated with Rational Developer for i (RDi), IBM’s flagship Java-based integrated development environment (IDE) for the platform. There are several components, per IBM i Debugger documentation, including client-based tools like Debug Manager, System Debugger, and IBM i PASE System Debugger, along with two host-based tools, Debug Hub and Debug Server. Noticeably absent are any plug-ins or connectors for Web-based IDEs.

• Debugging is a critical part of the application development process, but the close integration with RDi and native host-based development tools (like SEU) works to restrict access to this crucial tool. With the delivery of IBM i Merlin, which contains a Web-based VS Code IDE among its various components, the IBM i product management team is looking to loosen access to the IBM i debugging capability.

• Your business runs on IT and chances are if your systems are down, your business is down. Have you contemplated the most common reasons for data loss and whether your strategy can protect you in the event of natural disaster, hardware failure, fire, ransomware, human error or theft? Depending on the reason for your outage, you may experience data loss and need to leverage your backups to recover. Are you confident in your backup and recovery strategy?

• One of the simplest tests you can do to assess your backup strategy is to see how you stack up against the 3-2-1 best practices for backups. This requires that you have 3 copies of your data on 2 different media with 1 of them being offsite. When I visit companies and talk to them about their backup strategies, very few are meeting the 3-2-1 best practices.

• The name “Merlin” conjures up an image of a magical place where wizards cast spells against evil spirits and fairies fly through the air. In other words, the exact opposite of the button-down image of business computing that IBM tries its best to exude. That’s what makes the story of how the newest member of the IBM i product lineup got its name so unlikely.

• Twenty-two months ago, the folks at the IBM Rochester had an idea for a new product that would help to modernize development and operations processes on IBM i. In addition to Web-based IDE based on VS Code, it would bring integration with Git for source code management and Jenkins for continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD). It was chosen to run in a container on OpenShift, Red Hat’s Linux-based distribution of Kubernetes.

• The 40-year-old program Lotus 1-2-3 was reverse engineered to be 100 percent usable on Linux platforms. This program was popular in the 1980s for offering spreadsheet calculations, database functionality, and graphical charts. However – since Microsoft’s introduction of GUI-based products in the 1990s – the IBM program became inferior. Experts are hopeful that Lotus Software will run on screens larger or smaller than a 80×25 window. (Source: Techradar).

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra

• I am a GNU/Linux user, lover, translator and supporter since 2000 and a sysadmin since 2003 using Red Hat 5.0, later Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise Linux. I am using Ubuntu on my personal computers since December 2006. Canonical sent me a zero-priced gift pack of 10 CDs with Ubuntu 6.10 back then. I started deployment of Ubuntu servers with Ubuntu 8.04 manual installation in 2009, and just provisioned a few instance with 22.04 on Linode. Between 2009 and 2017, I personally installed Ubuntu and Linux Mint on over 6,000 new desktops or laptops.

• I am from Dhaka, Bangladesh. In 2011, along with 21 other Free software enthusiasts, I formed an organization titled FOSS Bangladesh (Foundation for Open Source Solutions Bangladesh) and started with official tour of the universities here in the country. Up to 2019, FOSS Bangladesh had organized 75 events in various universities, colleges and schools, to spread the word about digital freedom knowledge among the pupils – the future leaders.

Programming/Development

• This is the fifth installment in the series of blog posts on how to adjust your QML application to take the maximum advantage of qmlsc. In the first post we’ve set up the environment. You should read that post first in order to understand the others. After fixing various other problems in the previous posts we’re going to learn how to straighten out cyclic dependencies between QML documents.

Leftovers

Security

• Can my IBM i really be hit with a virus? Can it be hit with ransomware?

• These are the questions I regularly get from clients as a security expert with more than 20 years of experience. With the pervasiveness of these ransomware threats and sophisticated cyberattacks that we’re seeing in recent times, it only makes sense that we pay close attention to these threats.

• Security on the IBM i is a complex topic, and it is not one that is easily tackled with a few bullet points and tweaks of systems settings. Just like programming on the platform, for that matter. And people have to take the same care with security that they do with programming. These days, applications are not much good if they are not secure, as more than a few companies have found out the hard way. This is a big mind shift, and one that a lot of IT organizations need to get in gear with.

• A government-aligned attacker tried using a Microsoft vulnerability to attack U.S. and E.U. government targets.

• Researchers have added state-sponsored hackers to the list of adversaries attempting to exploit Microsoft’s now-patched Follina vulnerability. According to researchers at Proofpoint, state-sponsored hackers have attempted to abuse the Follina vulnerability in Microsoft Office, aiming an email-based exploit at U.S. and E.U. government targets via phishing campaigns.

• Proofpoint researchers spotted the attacks and believe the adversaries have ties to a government, which it did not identify. Attacks consist of campaigns targeting victims U.S. and E.U. government workers. Malicious emails contain fake recruitment pitches promising a 20 percent boost in salaries and entice recipients to download an accompanying attachment.

• Researchers at BlackBerry and Intezer have discovered a new Linux malware named “Symbiote” that is being used to target financial institutions across Latin America.

• Joakim Kennedy, security researcher at Intezer, and the BlackBerry Research & Intelligence Team released a report last week highlighting the financially motivated campaign, noting that what makes Symbiote different from other Linux malware is that “it needs to infect other running processes to inflict damage on infected machines.”

• Windows and Linux systems are being targeted by a ransomware variant called HelloXD, with the infections also involving the deployment of a backdoor to facilitate persistent remote access to infected hosts.

Defence/Aggression

• The war in Ukraine has morphed into an artillery battle, with Kyiv even more reliant than ever on heavy weaponry from the West. The country no longer has high hopes for significant support from Germany.

• The Russian Embassy in Ottawa asked the city to fly the Russian flag and illuminate a wing of City Hall in red, white and blue to mark Russia Day on Sunday, but the city refused.

• According to a statement from Arnold McLean, the city’s chief of protocol, his office received the request from the Embassy of the Russian Federation on Feb. 23, the day before Russian troops invaded Ukraine.

Environment

• More than 70 million are under heat warnings and advisories this weekend through early next week as a potent heat dome sends temperatures soaring to levels the National Weather Service is calling “potentially deadly.”

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• Loxy is a Gemini-to-HTTP proxy service written using ASP.NET Core 6.0.

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