● 06.20.22

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 20/06/2022: Curtail and Tagger

Posted in News Roundup at 9:30 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Desktop/Laptop

•  Should you buy the HP Dev One? Well, first things first, while it is a developer-focused machine, it is not only for developers. Anyone that wants a quality laptop that comes with a Linux-based operating system pre-installed should absolutely check it out. This is a fine laptop for developers, students, business users, home users… hell, anyone. The AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 5850U APU is even capable of light gaming.

• Look, folks, the HP Dev One is thin, fairly light, and very solidly built. The specs are all respectable and both the RAM and storage are user-upgradeable. Pop!_OS is one of the easiest Linux distributions for beginners, but even expert-level Linux users love it too. When such wonderful software and hardware come together, greatness happens. This is simply a great laptop that is a joy to use. At $1,099 you just cannot go wrong.

Server

• What does that mean? Unlike traditional system administrators, site reliability engineers (SREs) apply solid software engineering principles to their day-to-day work.

Applications

•  Got a bunch of images with huge file sizes taking too much disk space? Or perhaps you have to upload an image to a web portal that has file size restrictions?

• There could be a number of reasons why you would want to compress images. There are tons of tools to help you with it and I am not talking about the command line ones here.

• You can use a full-fledged image editor like GIMP. You may also use web tools like Squoosh, an open source project from Google. It even lets you compare the files for each compression level.

•  Google has a firm grip on the desktop. Their products and services are ubiquitous. Don’t get us wrong, we’re long-standing admirers of many of Google’s products and services. They are often high quality, easy to use, and ‘free’, but there can be downsides of over-reliance on a specific company. For example, there are concerns about their privacy policies, business practices, and an almost insatiable desire to control all of our data, all of the time.

• What if you are looking to move away from Google and embark on a new world of online freedom, where you are not constantly tracked, monetised and attached to Google’s ecosystem.

• In this series we explore how you can migrate from Google without missing out on anything. We recommend open source solutions.

• I’ve been curating summer mixtapes for friends (well mix SD cards since their cars don’t have tape players) and I’ve needed to do a bit of basic tag editing to make sure everything is correctly labeled.

• As I’m sure you’re aware, there is a ton of ace audio tag editing software for Linux, much of it open source. These apps are great and can do what I need to. However, I find some of them a little overwhelming for my simple metadata editing needs, often to the point that I don’t know how to use them correctly.

• I don’t need something resembling a MySQL database just to correct the odd bit of errant capitalisation in the artist field of a couple of MP3s, y’know?

• Fitting the role perfectly is Tagger. This is a relatively new GTK4/libadwaita app that bills itself as an “easy-to-use music tag (metadata) editor” and YOU’LLNEVERGUESSWHAT?!! – I found it to be exactly that.

Instructionals/Technical

• The environment variable is a pair of keys and values stored within the system and can be accessed by an application from the shell or sub-shell.

• You can set environmental variables for your programs, such as user preferences, long commands into the more minor abbreviations, system locale, the path of the executable file, development environment variables, etc.

• Hello Linux geeks, welcome to the guide on how install Docker on Fedora 36 step by step. This guide also be applicable to previous versions of Fedora 35/34. During this guide, we will be installing docker community edition package from docker official repository.

• Docker is a Platform as a Service (PaaS) tool which leverage the OS level virtualization to spin up containers. System on which docker is installed is known as Docker Engine.

• The bash prompt is probably the happiest place for most Linux users. A typical Linux bash prompt will look like the following screenshot.

• Wine is popular software that allows many Windows applications to run on Linux. The problem with Wine, however, is some required configurations for each application you want to use can be extremely time-consuming and prone to errors while setting up. A great PlayOnLinux will make your life easier by providing easy-to-understand automated installation of many popular installations, which can benefit the average desktop users or new users of Linux.

• In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install PlayOnLinux on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy Jellyfish using the command line terminal using the default Ubuntu APT repository or installing the Flatpak third-party package manager to get a newer version binary.

• The term filesystem is a fancy word to describe how your computer keeps track of all the files you create. Whether it’s an office document, a configuration file, or thousands of digital photos, your computer has to store a lot of data in a way that’s useful for both you and it. Filesystems like Ext4, XFS, JFS, BtrFS, and so on are the “languages” your computer uses to keep track of data.

• Your desktop or terminal can do a lot to help you find your data quickly. Your file manager might have, for instance, a filter function so you can quickly see just the image files in your home directory, or it might have a search function that can locate a file by its filename, and so on. These qualities are known as file attributes because they are exactly that: Attributes of the data object, defined by code in file headers and within the filesystem itself. Most filesystems record standard file attributes such as filename, file size, file type, time stamps for when it was created, and time stamps for when it was last visited.

• Cryostat is a tool for managing JDK Flight Recorder data on Kubernetes. Cryostat 2.1 is now installable using a Helm chart. While the Cryostat Operator is our preferred installation method for production environments, the Cryostat Helm chart is a better choice for demo purposes. The Helm chart has a flexible design and requires few permissions to allow many users as needed.

• A process ID is the number assigned to an application by the operating system. This serves to identify the application uniquely while it is running. This number changes for each copy of a program running. And it is different each time an application opens and closes.

• By the nature of the system, further applications are spawned by the original process that is loaded when the operating system is loaded. So all processes have a parent and child relationship with the process that spawned them.

• The Apache web server default root directory for storing site content is at the “/var/www/html” path. This directory can be manually changed to the custom directory of your choice.

• To achieve this, you need to edit Apache configuration files depending upon the distribution you were using and replace the current directory path with the new location.

• Continuous Delivery or commonly known as CD is quite a common term in Software Development. It is basically used for all the code changes which automatically are updated n the production release. It can update all the changes from new features to configuration changes, and from bug fixes,—into production.

• Waterfox is fresh air for those who want to maintain their privacy and security online. This browser has been made explicitly with 64-bit processors in mind but also runs on ARM devices like smartphones or tablets without any issues! In addition, it can be found across multiple platforms, including classic desktop systems and recent ones such as Mac OS X/ Linux interfaces, where users will enjoy its fast performance thanks to an open-source codebase that ensures stability over time.

• In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install Waterfox Browser on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS desktop using the command line terminal with tips about maintaining and removing the browser versions.

• qBittorrent is a cross-platform free and open-source BitTorrent client. qBittorrent is a native application written in C++ which uses Boost, Qt 5 toolkit, and libtorrent-rasterbar library and is extremely lightweight and fast. qBittorrent is very popular amongst torrent users as the main alternative to UTorrent.

• In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install qBittorrent on Debian 11 Bullseye desktop GUI and install qBittorrent-nox, which can be installed on a desktop or headless server using the command line terminal to access the WEB UI.

• A software called Atinout reads a list of AT instructions. It sends each instruction/command to the modem one at a time while waiting for the current command’s final result code before moving on to another command on the list. Atinout is a program that runs the AT commands in order and records the modem’s answer. In this article, we will discuss the installation and the use of Atinout on Ubuntu systems.

• Atinout is an application available for different versions of Linux. Ubuntu is a Linux operating system that is very popular and easy to use. We can install and use Atinout on the Ubuntu system.

Distributions and Operating Systems

Reviews

• openSUSE is a project which almost always impresses me with its technology, its integration, and its flexibility. However, it’s never a distribution I’ve run as my main operating system for various reasons. One of the main reasons I haven’t fully embraced openSUSE, despite its many technological capabilities, is its inconsistent polish. Some aspect of the operating system are polished and developed to near perfection. The installer is both fairly easy to navigate and surprisingly flexible. The default Btr filesystem is powerful and its snapshots easy to use. The YaST control panel is remarkably good at adjusting low level aspects of the operating system and integrates nicely with Btrfs.

• However, on the other side of things, we have issues like the KDE Wallet utility nagging the user and displaying vague prompts about which cryptography functions to use. The live media offers a different and quite less appealing experience than the installed operating system, and (despite the progress in this arena) the documented steps to install media codecs are still some of the most complex in the Linux ecosystem.

• openSUSE 15.4 feels like a distribution by system administrators for administrators. We can set up a printer and rollback filesystem snapshots with a few clicks of the mouse, but installing video codecs is a two-commands-and-four-prompts command line process. Managing services and setting up network shares takes just a few clicks, but getting sound working on the live disc was an exercise in frustration. openSUSE is a distribution which makes a lot of usually hard tasks easy and the normally easy tasks hard.

• In short, some parts of openSUSE feel like the Iron Man nanotech suit and some parts feel like they were built in a cave. The former parts definitely outweigh the latter, but the little issues are what separate a good, solid distribution from a great experience.

New Releases

• Manjaro Linux is a rolling-release distribution. So, technically, you will be on the latest version if you regularly update your system.

• It should not be a big deal to upgrade to Manjaro 21.3.0, considering I am already running it without issues for a few days before the official announcement.

• Also, you might want to read my initial experience switching to Manjaro from Ubuntu (if you’re still on the fence).

• SpiralLinux is the result of the creator of GeckoLinux turning their attention to Debian – with an interesting outcome.

• Some Linux distros have many remixes and respins, while some have very few. For example, there are multiple downstream variants of Debian and Ubuntu, but very few of Fedora. The Reg FOSS desk is only aware of one for openSUSE: GeckoLinux, whose Rolling edition we looked at earlier this year.

• Now, the creator of GeckoLinux – who prefers to remain anonymous – has turned their attention to one of the most-remixed distros there is, Debian, to create SpiralLinux. What can a new remix bring to the already-crowded table of Debian meta-distributions? (That is: distributions built from other distributions.)

• SpiralLinux is to Debian what GeckoLinux is to openSUSE. They both offer easier, friendlier ways to install the upstream distro, but the final result is as close as possible to its parent. Neither adds any new components that aren’t in the parent distro, and updates come direct and unmodified from upstream.

• Both Debian and openSUSE offer default downloads which boot directly into an installation program. This is in contrast to the more modern Ubuntu and Fedora way of doing things, where the install image boots into a live desktop, so you can try it out and get a feel for it before you commit yourself to installing it. (We must be fair and note that both Debian and openSUSE do offer optional live-image downloads as well – but you need to know to look for them.)

Fedora Family / IBM

• Security remains a top concern for developers working with containers and Kubernetes. In a just-released paper from Red Hat, the 2022 State of Kubernetes security report, 93% of respondents experienced at least one security incident in their Kubernetes environments during the previous year. And 31% of respondents attributed revenue or customer loss to these security incidents.

• Innumerable tools exist—including intrusion detection systems, code scanners, and more—to improve security in an increasingly at-risk software development environment. Unfortunately, few of these are built with the unique risks and needs of a Kubernetes environment in mind.

• Organizations looking to improve the customer service experience have long turned to digital solutions – to great effect if done correctly. According to McKinsey, organizations that successfully leverage digital products to improve the customer experience are able to increase customer satisfaction by up to 20 percent, reduce the cost to serve by up to 40 percent, and boost conversion rates and growth by 20 percent.

• However, to truly impact and improve the customer experience, organizations need to go beyond simply purchasing a product. Research from Boston Consulting Group shows that 70 percent of digital transformation efforts fail, often for reasons that have more to do with implementation than with the actual solutions themselves.

• At a recent Tech Titans Industry luncheon, I had the honor of moderating with three distinguished leaders of change on how to improve diversity in IT…

Devices/Embedded

• SparkFun has unveiled a data logging module compatible with their own Thing Plus devices. The SparkFun Thing Plus Dual-Port Logging Shield features an ATtiny841 MCU which allows the user to interface with a microSD card through SPI or USB-C.

• According to the company, the Dual-Port Logging Shield was designed for easy data transmission using any standard Arduino SD library. The module can be connected to a computer via USB-C and perform read/write operations with speeds up to 35MBytes/seconds.

• The Iono RP D16 module provides sixteen digital 24V I/O lines, an RS-485 serial interface, a wide range 12-28V power supply input, and its DIN-rail case enables installation in electrical cabinets and automation control systems.

• With the growing importance of Raspberry Pi and its compute module series, the Banana Pi company has introduced its own series similar to Raspberry Pi. They have right now released several series of micro-computers, but this time they are releasing Banana Compute Module, getting inspiration from the previous Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4. However, the developers have put in some amazing specs in the device to blow up your mind.

• If you don’t know about the Banana Pi Compute Module, you should read this article that will provide you with all the information about the compute module developed by BananaPi foundation.

• We’ve written about STMicro Time-of-Flight ranging sensors several times over the year, including the latest VL53L8 which offers a range of up to 4 meters. But if your application would benefit from a more extended range, Toppan and Brookman Technology have designed a three-dimensional range image sensor (3D sensor) capable of measuring distances from one to 30 meters. using a hybrid Time-of-Flight (ToF) method.

• That method, proposed by Professor Shoji Kawahito of Shizuoka University, is a new sensing technology combining the indirect ToF method of measuring distance by phase difference and the direct ToF methodology for measurement based on time differences. The hybrid method is said to be more tolerant to ambient light noise than the conventional indirect ToF method, especially outdoors.

• ShaRPiKeebo is a new tiny Linux computer complete with a daylight readable screen, keyboard and long-range transceiver. Measuring just 6 x 11 x 1.5 cm and powered by a Raspberry Pi (RPi) Zero W or 2W.

• “Who hasn’t dreamed of a computer the size of a calculator they could use to play games or carry out system-administration tasks when they’re on the go? Who doesn’t want a way to keep busy or stay entertained on a bus or a train or a subway? (A way that does not require balancing expensive hardware on their lap while repeatedly elbowing their neighbors…) Who wouldn’t enjoy leaving their bag or backpack at home more often? Scenarios like this speak to us, here at Morpheans, so we decided to make them a reality—with the ShaRPiKeebo nanocomputer.”

• lectronic enthusiasts, students, hobbyists and those interested in building a Raspberry Pi robot may be interested in a new tutorial published to the Hackster.io website this week providing information on how to create a small form factor Raspberry Pi robot. The Zumo can be controlled by a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W and STM32 micro-controller and takes about four days to complete according to the project details on the Hackster.io website.

• Hardware components include a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W mini PC, Zumo Chassis Kit, DFRobot Micro metal Gear Motors, Custom Hardware & Software all powered by a rechargeable Pimoroni Lipo battery 3.3V 2000mAh.

• “The first step was to decide not to use the Zumo Shield from Pololu. It’s a great shield designed specifically for the Arduino Uno, but it cannot be used to charge batteries. I wanted to use Lipo Battery Charger from Adafruit. However, with chip shortage being the pain of the day (week? month? year?? When will it end lol), I did not have anything which would meet my first need, a battery charger and boost converter. Not to let a crisis go to waste, I decided to design my own Battery Charger and Boost Converter Circuit.”

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

Programming/Development

• I have been kicking the tyres of the Hare programming language recently. I find that a useful program to create when exploring new programming languages is to echo stdin to stdout.

• Qt has been released as Open Source since its very first version all the way back in 1994. But development happened in a closed-source fashion inside the companies owning Qt (Trolltech and then Nokia). In 2011, we changed this. We took the big step and turned Qt into a real Open Source project, with a public governance structure consisting of Approvers, Maintainers and one Chief Maintainer.

• I had the honour of being the Chief Maintainer for the Qt Project since that time. It’s been 11 fantastic years for Qt, where we’ve seen a huge amount of new features and work flowing into Qt. We’ve seen a large growth in our user base, and we released 2 major versions, 21 minor versions and countless patch level releases of Qt.

• Here at Enterprising Enterprise, we love technology, but we’re also pushing it hard, constantly trying to expand the frontier of what’s possible.

• Recently I was looking at a panel in one of our Grafana dashboards and noticed that its PromQL queries used avg_over_time() when it (now) felt as if max_over_time() was what the panel should be using. It’s been years since I created this panel and last touched it, and I definitely no longer remember what I was thinking at the time. Did I have a good reason that avg_over_time() was necessary, or did an average just feel more correct for the purpose of the panel at the time I created it?

• We have Prometheus alert rules with similarly tangled PromQL expressions, but since Prometheus alert rules are (normally) configured in YAML text files that allow comments, most of our complicated and non-obvious alert rules have commentary about why they’re that way, what options don’t work, and so on. This commentary has periodically been extremely helpful for refreshing my mind about what on earth past me was thinking when he wrote the rule.

• Setting up Grafana panels and dashboards is normally done through their web GUI, which doesn’t really offer any good way of writing this sort of commentary.

• The new version of compliment has already been integrated in cider-nrepl 0.28.5 and it’s being used by CIDER’s 1.5-SNAPSHOT builds. That’s probably the easiest way to take it out for spin. I hope you’ll love this release and I hope I didn’t mess anything up!

• You might be wondering why I’m doing the release announcement this time around instead of compliment’s author and all-star Clojure hacker Alex Yakushev. Well, sadly Alex has been impacted much more by the war than me. He’s from Ukraine and is now fighting for the freedom of his country. In the mean time I’ll be helping Alex out a bit with the maintenance of compliment until he’s back home safe and sound.

• A bunch of almost unbelievably clever tech tricks come together into something practical with redbean 2: a webserver plus content in a single file that runs on any x86-64 operating system.

• The project is the culmination – so far – of a series of remarkable, inspired hacks by programmer Justine Tunney: αcτµαlly pδrταblε εxεcµταblε, Cosmopolitan libc, and the original redbean. It may take a little time to explain what it does, so bear with us. We promise, you will be impressed.

Standards/Consortia

• When it comes to sort out your emails, there are many strategies. Since I have been working at W3C, I’m a fan of dated spaces. I apply this strategy to my emails using Sieve.

Leftovers

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• Recent blood studies on the continent show up to 65% of people in Africa have been infected with COVID-19.

• New studies suggest that bits of COVID-19 can linger in a patient’s gastrointestinal system for months after the person is infected.

• Ami Bhatt, an oncologist and geneticist at Stanford University in California, and Timon Adolph, a gastroenterology internist at the Medical University of Innsbruck in Austria, led separate studies. In the pandemic’s early days, the number of COVID-19 patients who experienced vomiting, diarrhea, abdominal pain and other gastrointestinal issues baffled both Bhatt and Adolph.

• “At that time, this was thought to be a respiratory virus,” Bhatt, who referred to the lingering coronavirus bits as “ghosts,” told Nature magazine.

Proprietary

• June’s Patch Tuesday update releases for Windows 11 have once gain proved to be problematic. Microsoft has acknowledged a new known issue with the operating system following the installation of the KB5014697 update. The KB5014697 update was supposed to address a number of security flaws in Windows 11, but it also introduced connectivity issues for some users, Microsoft is currently investigating the problem which affects Windows 11’s Wi-Fi hotspot feature.

Security

• The primary use of computers in any form, whether it’s a mobile phone, personal computer, or a workstation, or a server offering services on the internet, is for the storage and manipulation of data and generation of information to support our daily lives. Paramount in our use of or interaction with computers is privacy and data or information security whether these entities are at rest (in storage) or in transit.

• Even as a beginner or an intermediate Linux user, it will serve you right to always use your laptop, workstation, or VPS in the cloud with security in mind. We have prepared a list of features security features and tools for you to get started with understanding and practicing security on any Linux operating system.

Defence/Aggression

• Saudi Arabia doesn’t exactly have a positive track record when it comes to digital espionage.

• In 2018, the country’s government reportedly used the notorious spy software Pegasus on devices belonging to the family of Jamal Khashoggi, the Saudi dissident and journalist who was killed that year in a gruesome assassination allegedly orchestrated by the government.

• In 2019, two former Saudi employees of Twitter in the US were charged with using the popular social media platform to unmask critics of the Saudi government.

• And last year, a Saudi aid worker who had used a Twitter account to make jokes about his government was jailed for 20 years. His case is believed to be connected to the government’s infiltration of Twitter.

• And then there’s Google. The online giant has the most popular search engine and most-used, web-based email service in the world. Part of US company Alphabet Inc., Google regularly boasts about how carefully it protects users’ data. But it has also had some noteworthy run-ins with authoritarian leaders.

• A new EU certificate allows drones over 25 kilograms to fly beyond visual range in civil and military airspace. But there have been crashes.

• The German Armed Forces Procurement Office tested a drone for the first time in military airspace beyond visual range, while regular air traffic was also taking place there. Flown was the UAV One 150 fixed-wing aircraft from the Primoco company in the Czech Republic.

• The aircraft was equipped with transponders for this purpose in addition to radio communication. This allowed it to be integrated into the air traffic management system of manned aviation. The required sensors came from the German interception specialist Plath.

• Plath and Primoco described the drone flights as a „milestone“ in a German military airspace. In fact, the tests could provide a breakthrough. That’s because until now, aviation law has stipulated that heavy drones can generally only fly in restricted airspace. This enormously reduces the possibilities for use in the military and civilian sectors.

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