● 06.14.22

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 14/06/2022: KDE Plasma 5.25 and FreeCAD 0.20

Posted in News Roundup at 10:26 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Desktop/Laptop

• Also I am one of three people who use linux in my class

Applications

• FreeCAD 0.20 was released on 14 June 2022, get it from the Download page. This page lists all new features and changes.

Instructionals/Technical

• A beginner’s guide to upgrade to KDE Plasma 5.25 from Plasma 5.24 desktop environment via terminal and GUI method.

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install VidCutter on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, VidCutter is a simple video editing cross-platform program for Linux, Windows, and Mac. It is built on Python and Qt5, using FFmpeg as back-end decoding and encoding. It has tools for cutting all sorts of media, but it’s not a full-blown video editor instead, its focus lies solely on slicing up videos into clips you could then upload onto your website.

• 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 VidCutter 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.

• Podman is a free and open-source daemonless container engine that was developed by RedHat. It exists to help developers manage and deploy their applications in a Linux environment. Similar to the Kubernetes platform, Podman works with pods. Podman seeks to be the alternative to the Docker engine which is also a containerization platform. Podman improves on Docker by decentralizing the components needed for container management. Podman has a few distinguishing differences, the main one being its architecture. It runs on a daemonless architecture. This article will guide you on how to install and use podman on Rocky Linux 8

• AlmaLinux is a free and open-source community-driven operating system developed as a perfect alternative to CentOS 8 which RedHat discontinued in favor of CentOS Stream. It is 1:1 binary compatible with RHEL and is built to support enterprise and production-grade workloads.

• AlmaLinux first graced the Linux community on 30th, March 2021 with AlmaLinux 8.4 as the first release. AlmaLinux 9 was released on 26, May 2022. Codenamed Emerald Puma, AlmaLinux 9 provides an array of new features and enhancements to improve user experience and functionality.

• In this guide, we will walk you through the installation of AlmaLinux 9.0.

• This tutorial will take you through different methods that you can apply to update your Nvidia GPU drivers to their latest version.

• Nvidia cards use an open-source Nouveau driver by default but this driver does not harness the full power of this GPU and can underperform.

• The proprietary Nvidia drivers are required if you want your GPU to perform to its fullest.

• You can update your drivers using several methods and we will go through each technique one by one so that you can choose the one you prefer the most. The different ways you can update your Nvidia drivers on Ubuntu are listed below and after going through them you will be able to perform these tasks yourself.

• During a computer’s boot process, you must transition from a firmware (UEFI or BIOS) process to loading a kernel and then finally to the user environment. When booting a POSIX system, you can choose to interrupt the boot process to adjust settings or even to log in using a chroot environment.

• This is a useful troubleshooting and maintenance technique, but it’s also the reason it’s so important to utilize full disk encryption when installing your operating system. When a drive is encrypted, nothing on the drive is accessible without your passphrase, even from a preboot environment. As long as you have the passphrase to decrypt your drive, you can interrupt a Linux system’s boot process and access the drive without booting into a full operating system (OS).

• Nginx is an open-source lightweight web server alternative to apache to handle high-traffic websites.

• With all its due features, it can easily manage to load balance and reverse proxy for your site or can be used as a mail server proxy as a POP and IMAP.

• By default, Nginx runs on port 80 to handle web traffic requests, which can be changed to something else by editing the configuration files. Today, you will learn how to change the Nginx port in Linux in a few simple steps.

WINE or Emulation

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• Plasma 5.25 brings new features and concepts to the desktop environment.

• Four months in the making, the KDE Plasma 5.25 desktop environment series is here to introduce exciting new features like full control of the Tablet Mode from both Wayland and X11 sessions, new finger-following (1:1) touchpad gestures for touch-friendly devices, a configuration window for KRunner, as well as a new floating mode for the panel that detaches it from the bottom of the screen to look more like a dock.

• KDE Plasma 5.25 has been one of the most anticipated releases, considering its recent focus on visual refinements and workflow improvements.

• For instance, you got an updated Breeze theme and a new overview effect to improve the workflow with KDE Plasma 5.24 LTS.

• Finally, KDE Plasma 5.25 has landed with more upgrades!

• This week sees the release of KDE Plasma 5.25, the latest version of the hugely popular free and open source desktop environment.

• KDE Plasma 5.25 serves as the follow-up to KDE Plasma 5.24 LTS, last year’s sizeable and well-received long-term support update. Although the new update isn’t an LTS it does boast over 400 bug fixes and a number of interesting new features that users will be keen to try.

• So without any further waffle, let’s look at 5 of the best new features in KDE Plasma 5.25.

• During my long train trip to the Linux App Summit 2022, I started working on a contact book feature in Kalendar. There was already a small contact integration in the event editor to select attendees for an event and I wanted to extend it with a simple contact info viewer and editor.

• When I started it, I was full of hope that this would be a simple task and would be easy to finish. Unfortunately more than one month later, it’s not finished but there is a lot of progress that I can already show off.

• Have I said nice things about Kate recently? Not enough, so let me gush a little about Kate as an “IDE” and using it, with the Build Plugin, as a tool for editing locally and building remotely.

• I work on a codebase that has very specific platform requirements. These requirements are difficult to reproduce in a normal host – or, if you have some modern rolling distro like openSUSE, well-nigh-impossible. That’s the situation where Docker shows up, since a Docker container can be whatever specific platform is needed.

• So I have a Docker, with the special compilation environment over here, and the host machine, running a recent version of Kate over there. How can I make them work together?

• Hello, reader! I am Suhaas Joshi, a 20-year-old 3rd-year student at CHRIST University, India. I have been selected to GSoC 2022 as a mentee in KDE. This blog will track my KDE development work during, and after, GSoC coding period.

Distributions and Operating Systems

• Are you a newcomer to Linux? Not sure which Linux distribution to choose to begin your Linux journey? This article is for you!

• For the average PC user who has been using the established desktop operating systems such as Microsoft Windows and macOS, Linux can be somewhat confusing. Furthermore, the perception that Linux is mainly used by “pro” users and is “very complex” plays against it.

• Of course, neither of the preceding two statements is true. Linux is a complex operating system, just like any other. And, as always, it all depends on the individual.

•  Distrobox is a software tool that allows you to run any Linux distribution inside the terminal.

• It aims to let you run a variety of software on top of host distribution without any hassle.

• For instance, — is there anything that is available only in the AUR and you want to access it from your Ubuntu system? Distrobox can give you that comfort.

• EasyOS has an “update” icon on the desktop, that checks if a later version online, and if so offers to download and update the local installation.

• The problem we have been having is that it uses rsync, which reduces the size of the download by only downloading the difference between current and latest version; however, it disconnects, seemingly randomly. Perhaps it is a problem with ibiblio.org getting too busy, as the problem does seem dependent on the time-of-day.

New Releases

• Lots of improvements on the design. New cloud and tech tools. Improvements of the packages and confs.

• Codename: Rolling

• After 6 months of intensive work, here is the 2.1 version of Kaisen Linux. This release marks above all the arrival of a new official wallpaper, after more than 2 years of improvements on the first one! Big graphic improvements on logos, menus and plymouth theme have been done.

• The NuTyX team is happy to announce the new version of NuTyX 22.06.1 and cards 2.5.0.

• New toolchain gcc 12.1.0, glibc 2.35 and binutils 2.38.

• The xorg-server graphics server version 21.1.3, the Mesa 3D library in 22.1.1, Gtk4 4.6.5 and Qt 6.3.0.

• The python interpreters are en 3.10.5 et 2.7.18.

• The XFCE desktop environment is updated to version 4.16.0.

• The MATE desktop environment is a 1.26.0 version .

• The GNOME desktop environment is also updated to version 42.2

• The KDE desktop environment is available in Plasma 5.24.5, Framework 5.94.0 and applications in 22.04.2.

• Available browsers are: Firefox 101.0.1, Chromium 102.0.5005.115, Epiphany 42.2, etc

• Many desktop applications have been updated as well like Telegram-desktop 3.7.3, Thunderbird 91.10.0, Scribus 1.5.8, Libreoffice 7.3.4.2, Gimp 2.10.32, etc.

• Core NuTyX ships with Long Term Support (LTS) kernels: 4.14.282, 4.19.246, 5.4.197, 5.10.121 and 5.15.46 and the latest stable version 5.18.3 .

Fedora Family / IBM

• When this article was discussed in the Flatpak Matrix channel, several people noted that while this often said, they are sceptical that it’s really such a big number. Let’s find out!

• The specific examples given in the article are of apps which reuse a .deb (to which I will add .rpm), AppImage, Snap package, or binary .tar.gz archive. It’s not so easy to distinguish a binary tarball from a source tarball, so as a substitute I will look for apps which use the extra-data to download external sources at install time rather than at build time.

• I have cloned every repo from the Flathub GitHub organisation with this script I had lying around. There are 2,220 such repositories. This is a bigger number than the 1,518 apps cited in the blog post, because it includes many thing which are not apps, such as 258 GTK themes and 60 digital audio workstation plugins. I also believe that the 1,518 number does not include end-of-lifed apps, whereas my methodology does. This post will also ignore the existence of OBS Studio and Firefox, where those projects build the Flatpak from source on their own infrastructure and push the result into Flathub.

• Technical debt is unavoidable. And if it is not addressed, it can hamper your development process and product quality. While it costs time and money to fix accrued technical debt, prevention is better than cure. According to Gartner, infrastructure and operations leaders who can actively manage and reduce technical debt will achieve 50 percent faster delivery times.

• DevOps has emerged as the solution to many challenges in the IT industry. It can also address the technical debt challenge. Here are ten ways DevOps can help your business manage and reduce technical debt.

• If you go into a digital transformation initiative unprepared to manage change, you may well face a mutiny. Digital transformation may sound exciting, but it inevitably involves considerable disruption for individuals as well as the entire organization. Affected team members often feel a loss of control and connectedness.

• Your goal as an IT leader should be not only to avoid backlash but to turn the change into an opportunity to deepen engagement among those affected. It is critical that teams gain more control as part of the transformation. Transformation should not happen to them; rather, team members should help make transformation happen.

• Individuals need to have a say on changes, whether these involve new architectures and models, new algorithms, or decision-making and supervisory processes. Team members should be significant contributors to your final digital transformation.

• When security is ignored, organizations are putting at risk the core benefit of faster application development and releases. But security and agility do not have to be in contention.

• A recent Red Hat survey with more than 300 respondents, covered in our 2022 State of Kubernetes security report, identified the most pressing security needs and offered suggestions for putting your organization on track to protect security in Kubernetes environments.

• Our findings show that what happens in the build and deploy stages has a significant impact on security, as revealed by the prevalence of misconfigurations and vulnerabilities across organizations. Security, therefore, must shift left, embedded imperceptibly into DevOps workflows instead of being “bolted on” when the application is about to be deployed into production.

• My colleague, @FrostyX, recently shared a Red Hat Developer article, Thousands of PyPI and RubyGems RPMs now available for RHEL 9, with us.

• TL;DR access thousands of RPMs automatically generated from PyPI and RubyGems on RHEL 9.

• Sounds intriguing, I wanted to give it a shot.

Debian Family

• Parrot (popularly/formerly known as Parrot Security OS or Parrot OS) is a free and open-source Linux distribution derived from the well-known Debian Linux.

• Designed for security, privacy, and development, Parrot ships with an assortment of IT security and digital forensics tools, utilities, and libraries; development and programming tools; as well as privacy protection tools.

• It comes by default with MATE Desktop Environment (DE), however, users can install other DEs.

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

• OIS 2022 is over, but the OpenInfra community stays tuned for the next OpenInfra Summit, taking place in Vancouver in 2023! This year’s summit in Berlin offered a lot of insightful keynotes and technical sessions. Speakers discussed the most recent trends in the industry, including composable infrastructure and sustainable computing, and set the pace for the next releases of the OpenInfra-hosted project, including OpenStack. It was a great opportunity to reconnect in person after the pandemic.

• [...]

• During my keynote on Day 1, I discussed the fact that OpenStack has just entered the Slope of Enlightenment phase of its Hype Cycle. Most organisations have realised that OpenStack and Kubernetes are in fact complementary technologies rather than competing ones. Canonical happens to be well-positioned, as Ubuntu is a platform that integrates OpenStack, Kubernetes and applications very well.

Open Hardware/Modding

• Gaurav Singh, acting as Circuit Valley, has designed an open-source hardware USB 3.0 Type-C industrial camera with three boards: one to capture data through a CMOS sensor, another based on a Lattice Crosslink NX FPGA to handle image processing, and finally, a board equipped with an Infineon FX3 USB 3.0 controller for sending the video data to the host.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

• Mozilla’s Thunderbird is a fantastic open-source email client. In fact, one of the best email clients for Linux. With its upcoming Thunderbird 102 update, things should get really exciting!

• To spice it up, Mozilla decided to make an Android email client for Thunderbird.

• Surprisingly, it is already available to install…

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• If you want to view certain media files, such as photos and videos from your computer, or mobile on your TV, then you need to have enabled UPnP and DLNA-compliant devices, as well as, to set up a media server.

• In this article we will give brief explanations about DLNA, and UPnP devices, streamers, and servers.

• Here also you can find a rich list of free, and open-source DLNA and UPnP servers, and streamers which you can use freely to set up your own home entertainment system.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

•  One of Firefox’s strongest privacy features, Total Cookie Protection was first introduced with the Firefox 86 release of the open-source web browser, was extended to the Private Browsing mode with the Firefox 89 release, and further improved in Firefox 91 to prevent data leaks. If you haven’t heard, Total Cookie Protection protects your privacy by confining cookies to the website where they’re created. This prevents tracking companies from using the said cookies to track your browsing activity as you navigate across multiple websites.

Content Management Systems (CMS)

• At the exhibition stand you will have the opportunity to perform some real black-box testing, learn about Salience bias, Peltzman effect and Wason’s experiments and take a photo with our lovely mascot.

• The Kiwi TCMS team will be there to answer all of your questions regarding open source, community, support, various integrations and the differences between Self-Support, SaaS and Enterprise subscriptions!

Programming/Development

• We have released the Qt 6.3.1 today.

• The Squish team is happy to announce the release of the Squish GUI Tester version 7.0.1, the software quality assurance tool for cross-platform GUI application test automation.

• The first maintenance release in Squish 7.0 series is coming out 3 months after the major feature release version 7.0.0, and is now available for download.

Perl / Raku

• Andrew Shitov has announced the second Raku Conference (Twitter feed) to be held online on 13-14 August 2022. The submission deadline for presentations is 1 August 2022! But of course, you can already submit a talk proposal! And order your free ticket (although a donation would be really appreciated)!

• On Tuesday 21st June there will be a Perl IDE Hackathon in the Hackathon room at The Perl and Raku Conference. You can also participate in this event remotely.

• Our goal is to enhance IDE and Editor support for Perl 5 which is typically via plugins, with an an emphasis on helping people make their first every contribution. It’s not even required that you use the IDE/Editor that you are helping out with.

Leftovers

• Robyn has this song “Call your girlfriend” and it’s such a beautiful melody. It’s easy to understand why it’s such a widely-covered and well-beloved song.

Hardware

• NXP has announced a new MCX general-purpose Arm Cortex-M MCU family designed for advanced industrial and IoT edge computing and integrating an NXP neural processing unit (NPU) capable of delivering over 30 times higher performance than running the AI inference tasks on an Arm Cortex-M33 core alone.

• The new MCX portfolio builds upon the earlier NXP LPC and Kinetis microcontroller families, but does not replace these, and aims to improve machine learning performance and security for a variety of applications including machine learning, wireless, voice, motor control, analog, and more.

Security

• Last year, Tesla issued an update that made its vehicles easier to start after being unlocked with their NFC key cards. Now, a researcher has shown how the feature can be exploited to steal cars.

• For years, drivers who used their Tesla NFC key card to unlock their cars had to place the card on the center console to begin driving. Following the update, which was reported here last August, drivers could operate their cars immediately after unlocking them with the card. The NFC card is one of three means for unlocking a Tesla; a key fob and a phone app are the other two.

Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt/Fear-mongering/Dramatisation

• A newly discovered stealthy piece of Linux malware called Syslogk delivers a backdoor that remains hidden on targeted machine until its controller, from anywhere on the internet, transmits so-called ‘magic packets’.

Finance

• While Qantas services sank and 9000 lost their jobs, chief executive Alan Joyce engineered the biggest transfer from the public money to a corporation in Australia’s history. This was the non-bailout bailout. Time for a rethink on corporate welfare, writes Michael West. Scott Morrison and Josh Frydenberg, no doubt with the counsel of Qantas chief executive Alan Joyce, repelled calls for a Qantas “bail-out” in early April 2020. Yet, just as the pandemic gripped, they promptly began bailing it out. Virgin too, an airline 90% owned by foreign airlines and tax refugee Sir Richard Branson, a resident not only of the notorious tax haven, British Virgin Islands, but with his very own British Virgin island.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• For overseas readers, the “Liberals” here are the nominally right-of-centre party which govern in coalition with the Count-ry/Nationals. They also tend to be the most enthusiastic about the monarchy, whereas the Labor and Greens parties lean towards republicanism.

Civil Rights/Policing

• I woke up and said good morning to Oscar. “Go away daddy, I don’t love you.” I went downstairs. “Daddy can’t eat breakfast with me, he is not fun and he makes me sad.” I loaded Oscar onto my bike to go to pre-school. “Mummy I love you so much but I don’t love daddy at all.” Apparently normal, but starting to get to me. What if he was old enough to mean it?

• I don’t worry that my relationship with Oscar is ruined before it’s even begun. He’s two and is civil to me sometimes, especially when we’re on our own. When I went away for a few days he sent me a video saying “I want you to come back soon, I love you daddy,” although he wouldn’t talk to me on the phone. But when he’s browbeating me I do question the point of me being there if I’m just going to be ignored and abused. I wonder if I’m being over-sensitive. Aren’t children meant to crave the approval of their parents, not the other way round? But Gaby says that if he was like that to her then she’d be devastated. She also says that when I’m not there he tries to call me to tell me that he loves me but his phone is made of wood and he doesn’t know my number.

• Gaby thinks that he might like her more because she’s more attentive to his needs, but I don’t think that’s fair or likely, or even necessarily a good thing. The internet says that his hostility shows that he feels strongly bonded to me and knows that my love is unconditional. I think that’s a little too self-serving. This is surely just one of those things that toddlers do for reasons beyond our jurisdiction.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• The Ministry of Electronics & Information Technology (MeitY) published the Draft National Data Governance Framework Policy (National Data Governance Policy) for public consultation on May 27, 2022. The policy, which seeks to improve “governance through a whole-of(-)government approach towards data-led governance”, fails to adequately address resultant concerns regarding data privacy and citizen rights. In this post, we provide a brief overview of the comments we submitted to MeitY as part of this consultation process. Read our complete comments here.

Monopolies

• It’s time for governments to address the reality that five tech companies—not everyday consumers—control our online experiences today. Updated competition laws are essential for the internet to be private, secure, interoperable, open, accessible, transparent, and a balance between commercial profit and public benefit. This is Mozilla’s vision for the internet. For a number of years, we have shared our views supporting government competition efforts globally to achieve it.

• One such proposal now under discussion in the US Congress is the American Innovation and Choice Online Act (AICOA). This bill is an important step in correcting two decades of digital centralization by creating a level playing field for smaller, independent software companies to compete. We support this bipartisan effort led by Senators Amy Klobuchar and Chuck Grassley and Representatives David Cicilline and Ken Buck.

• We believe that AICOA will facilitate innovation and consumer choice by ensuring that big tech companies cannot give preference to their own products and services over the rich diversity of competitive options offered by others. Mozilla—and many other independent companies—cannot effectively compete without this antitrust law. We are disadvantaged by the fact that current and future Firefox users, many of whom are privacy and security focused, cannot easily install and keep Firefox as their preferred browser because of confusing operating system messages and settings. We are further challenged by app store rules designed to keep out Gecko, our independent browser engine that powers Firefox, Tor and other browsers. We are stuck when big tech companies do not offer us and other developers open APIs and other functionality needed for true interoperability.

• A fair playing field is vital to ensure that Mozilla and other independent companies can continue to act as a counterweight to big tech and shape the future of the internet to be more private and more secure. We understand that the bill sponsors intend AICOA to regulate only gatekeeper companies and their controlled products. It is not intended to regulate or impact the agreements or product offerings of non-regulated independent companies like Mozilla that partner with gatekeepers for critical services. Nor does it require trading off privacy and security in order to enhance competition.

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