● 07.13.22

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 13/07/2022: Rust Losing More People

Posted in News Roundup at 12:16 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Desktop/Laptop

• Another vendor has refreshed its Linux laptop lineup for the summer, and some of the new models look strangely familiar.

• Last week we covered the new Pulse G2 laptop from Germany’s Tuxedo Computers. Close behind it are new models from several other vendors of Linux laptops with very similar specs.

• In an unusual move that provides the FOSS project with additional funding, the KDE organization sells hardware under its own brand. A notable example is the KDE Slimbook, and it just launched two fourth-generation models of the Slimbook IV.

• The specs of the Slimbook IV are much like those of the Tuxedo Pulse G2: AMD Ryzen 7 5700U CPUs, with eight cores and 16 threads. The CPU clock speed varies between 1.8GHz and 4.3GHz according to load, and there’s 8MB of cache. The onboard Vega8 GPU runs at up to 1.9GHz.

• The machines have two DDR4 SODIMM slots, and can take up to 64GB of 3,200MHz memory, and also have two M.2 slots for up to 4TB of NVMe storage. They have both onboard Gigabit Ethernet and Wi-Fi 6 for a maximum speed of 2.4Gb/s, plus Bluetooth 5.2.

Server

• While the adoption of Kubernetes to speed software development has become a recipe for success in the containerized world, many organizations working to streamline and optimize their processes are encountering a major issue—namely, a heavy cost for repairs. When defects and other code issues occur without a cost-awareness and savings plan in place, the price of Kubernetes ownership can go through the roof. The good news is, cost optimization in Kubernetes boils down to two key words—proper configuration.

Graphics Stack

• DXVK 1.10.2 fixes bugs and crashes in many video games, including Beyond Good and Evil, Dead Space, Myst V, Day Z, Dirt Rally, Godfather, Limbo, Return of Reckoning, Scrapland Remastered, and Planetary Annihilation: TITANS.

• The Star Wars: The Force Unleashed II, Star Wars: The Old Republic, Majesty 2, Onechanbara Z2: Chaos, Plants vs. Zombies Garden Warfare 2, Small Radios Big Televisions, Sonic Adventure 2, Supreme Commander, and SpellForce Platinum Edition video games also received improvements.

• Now, a year later, I returned to this feature to make some important improvements, for nitty-gritty details you could dive into Mesa MR#16251 “tu: Overhaul LRZ, implement on-GPU dir tracking and LRZ fast-clear”. There I implemented on-GPU LRZ direction tracking, LRZ reuse between renderpasses, and fast-clear of LRZ.

• In this post I want to give a practical advice, based on things I learnt while reverse-engineering this feature, on how to help driver to enable LRZ. Some of it could be self-evident, some is already written in the official docs, and some cannot be found there. It should be applicable for Vulkan, GLES, and likely for Direct3D.

Instructionals/Technical

• Neofetch is a simple command-line tool that displays an ASCII logo of the distribution along with a few system information in the terminal. It looks beautiful and you can easily show which distribution, desktop environment, and themes you are using when you share the screenshots of your desktop in various Linux communities.

• Proxmox is my preferred hypervisor to deploy various containers and VMs. Sometimes, I want to create a VM inside another VM. Meaning – I just want to host a guest hypervisor(i.e VM) in my physical Proxmox hypervisor. Have you ever wondered how to setup a guest hypervisor in a host hypervisor? In this guide, I will show you how to enable nested virtualization in Proxmox VE and then enable VT-X in the guest hypervisor.

• An API (Application Programming Interface) is a set of rules shared by a particular service. These rules determine in which format and with which command set your application can access the service, as well as what data this service can return in the response. It acts as a layer between your application and external service.

• REST API (Representational state transfer) is an API that uses HTTPS requests for communication with web services. From the python site, the REST API can be viewed as a data source located on an internet address that can be accessed in a certain way through certain libraries.

• If you recently upgraded your version of Chrome OS, you may have noticed something different when you launch the Linux environment in Chrome OS version 103 and higher. Here’s how to use the new Chrome OS Linux interface.

• NFS or Network File System is a protocol that allows local users to access remote data from multiple disks and directories in the same way as local access. In this tutorial, you will learn how to install the NFS Server and Client on the Ubuntu 22.04 Server. You will also learn how to mount the NFS shared directory automatically at system boot on the client machine.

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install qBittorrent on Fedora 36. For those of you who didn’t know, qBittorrent is a free open-source cross-platform P2P BitTorrent client. The software also has an integrated RSS reader so that it can be used to download files directly from RSS feeds. This application is known to work effectively and efficiently on many operating systems such as Linux, Microsoft Windows, and FreeBSD. It is written in the C++ language.

• 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 qBittorrent BitTorrent client on a Fedora 36.

• DTOS now comes with the option to install any (or all) of three window managers: XMonad, Awesome and Qtile. I have also been fixing a lot of bugs with DTOS in recent days, so I thought I would do a test run. Today, I’m installing DTOS on top of ArcoLinuxB Awesome Edition.

• This tutorial will be helpful for beginners to install Audacious 4.2 on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, Linux Mint 20.3, AlmaLinux 9, Rocky Linux 8, and Fedora 36.

• Got a bunch of hexadecimal characters and want to convert them to a readable decimal system (ASCII)?

• There are multiple ways to convert hex to ASCII in Linux. You may also use these methods in your shell script if required.

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Ansible on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Ansible is the simplest way to automate apps and IT infrastructure. It runs on many Linux operating systems and is configured quite easily. It uses the open SSH service to perform the various networking tasks ensuring a well secure and protected communication environment. Nowadays IT environments are very complex and often need to scale extremely quickly. Automation makes system administrators’ and developers’ jobs easier and allows them to focus attention on other tasks that add value to an organization.

• 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 Ansible 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.

• Developers running applications in the cloud have traditionally separated their applications from storage, but recent services such as the Rook Operator for Kubernetes make it easy to create storage in the cloud. This article shows how to use Rook for object storage. Our example runs a single-node Red Hat OpenShift cluster on your laptop or desktop using Red Hat OpenShift Local (previously known as CodeReady Containers). We’ll install Rook, create object storage on OpenShift Local, and perform some bucket notifications.

• Expert troubleshooting skills are a must for sysadmins. Understanding how to identify and resolve problems that you come across is crucial to creating the best resolutions. Tools help you be successful in the quest for answers. Nmap is a helpful tool for security and IT professionals.

• Without understanding what network ports are open, it would be impossible to assess a system’s security. System administrators use Nmap to check if systems are online and help discover any problems in their network. You can also detect operating system versions, determine whether services are online, test embedded network stacks, and even identify aggressive network traffic.

• Being able to manage users and groups in a Linux operating system environment is an important milestone in terms of Linux administration and security. Under Linux, each user account is automatically associated with a single primary group. A Linux user cannot be a member of two or more primary groups, only one.

• However, when it comes to secondary groups, it’s a different case. A single Linux user account can be associated with more than one secondary group (up to 15).

• In summary, a primary group is OS-assigned to each Linux user account and is linked to user-created files whereas secondary groups can be associated with multiple Linux user accounts and are not always automatically assigned.

• Rapid7 and the open-source community manage the widely used penetration testing framework, Metasploit. It is a very powerful tool used by cybercriminals as well as ethical hackers to test and create exploits for networks or servers.

• A RAM is important in determining the performance spectrum of your Linux-powered machine. On the other hand, think of a RAM slot as the main memory socket or slot that physically exists on the computer’s motherboard to hold installed/inserted and compatible RAM.

• These RAM slots determine/specify the number and type of RAM compatible with the Linux-powered machine you are using. SDRAM (Synchronous DRAM), DDR (Double Data Rate), and DIMM (Dual In-Line Memory Module) are examples of some common RAM types. It is the computer motherboard that determines the existing number of RAM slots.

• Therefore, when the term RAM is mentioned, we should always think of RAM modules and RAM slots. Each RAM slot is compatible with a specific RAM module. Examples of popular RAM modules include DDR1, DDR2, DDR3, DDR4, and SDRAM.

Distributions and Operating Systems

SUSE/OpenSUSE

• It can help assist in making data-driven decisions, which can in turn, act as a catalyst to accelerate the digital transformation journey. In a nutshell, we can say that data is the new lifeblood of any digital enterprise – but it is only valuable when it is the right data, in the right format, and available at the right time. Therefore, in a world where data is growing exponentially, Zizo, a leading provider of big data and edge analytics, decided to build solutions that are flexible, adaptable and cost effective; with the ability to be deployed either at the edge, or in the data centre.

Fedora Family / IBM

• When IBM acquired Linux vendor Red Hat for $34 billion in 2019, Paul Cormier took the reins as Red Hat CEO. After three years, Cormier is now handing those reins over to a new leader.

• Yesterday, Red Hat announced that long-time engineering leader at the company, Matt Hicks, will now be the company’s president and CEO. Cormier will move to the chairman role, where he will continue to be an active participant in the company’s activities.

• In an interview with VentureBeat, both Cormier and Hicks emphasized that now is the right time for a CEO transition.

• In my first Red Hat Certified Engineer (RHCE) fast-track training in 2002, we were using Red Hat Linux 7.2, and I learned to love the network configuration files in /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts. Later, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 6 introduced NetworkManager (also known as ‘NM’).

• The Red Hat Shares newsletter helps IT leaders navigate the complicated world of IT―the open source way.

• Despite the global trend toward cloud migration, some businesses are pushing back, claiming the productivity and cost savings aren’t living up to their expectations. In fact, a recent McKinsey survey found that 75 percent of respondents went over budget on their cloud migration process and 38 percent were behind schedule.

• CIOs leading digital transformation initiatives are fundamentally changing the way their business operates.

• Digital transformation starts with the business, not the technology, and it’s no easy feat. According to a BCG report, “only about a third of transformations meet or exceed their target value and achieve sustainable change: these are the companies in the win zone. Worry-zone companies create some value but do not meet their targets and produce only limited long-term change.”

• Digital transformation is the implementation of new technology, people, and processes to improve the business. Any business IT strategy should the following three tenets in its digital transformation initiative.

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

• The Cinnamon, MATE, and Xfce editions of Linux Mint 21 beta have been approved for release by the Linux Mint project according to its community website. In an announcement last week, the Linux Mint project leader said that the beta was due last week, but there were issues with the beta ISOs which meant they received a “Rejected” status during the tests. Now that they have been approved, their release should be imminent.

• Typically, the beta period lasts about two weeks for any last minute issues to be tested by a wider audience. Following the beta, the final ISOs are made available to the public. In-place upgrades are sometimes enabled soon after the release and other times they are delayed to give more time for testing to be done of the new operating system version.

Devices/Embedded

• To have colored animations for beautiful displays, Neopixel is good as it can give any color combination. It looks like a RGB LED, but can work with one pin to control all in series. It’s cheap and easy to install for room decoration.

• If the Raspberry Pi Pico’s 2MB of QSPI flash is not quite sufficient for your needs, and you’d not quite a fan of micro USB ports, the WeAct RP2040 “clone” comes with up to 16MB flash and a USB Type-C port for power and programming.

• Another improvement is the addition of a reset button, which can be convenient for flashing UF2 firmware, and the pinout remains mostly the same. The price is not quite as low as the original Raspberry Pi Pico, but the board sells for an affordable $5.99 with 2MB flash, while the 16MB flash variant goes for $8.99 with shipping included in both cases.

Open Hardware/Modding

• Pixel Pump is an open-source hardware vacuum pump that should be easier to use than a pair of tweezers to pick and place SMT components, and suitable for prototypes and small production runs.

• The system comes with a pen with five exchangeable stainless-steel nozzles to match the size of components, a foot pedal, and several tactile silicone buttons with RGB backlighting to control the unit.

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• CalDavZAP is an open source CalDAV web client implementation released under GNU Affero General Public License (version 3.0).

• [...]

• The project is released and licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License (version 3.0).

Programming/Development

• Coding vs. Programming, the debate regarding the two terms being the same or not, has been going on for decades. It is a question that every tech beginner always considers and confuses. Sometimes, even the experts use the terms interchangeably because they do not believe that the differences matter much.

• But in reality, coding and programming are different. There are many factors where they differ, and it takes people years of experience to truly understand them. However, the IT industry uses both these fields to develop softwares that impact our daily lives – so they’re equally important.

• Kids are, by default, curious beings. Everything is new to them, and they love to explore. In this era of technology, keeping children up-to-date is also a part of parenting. Introducing them to programming is a great start, and there are tons of programming tools for kids to make it a fun experience.

• Studies suggest that the best age to start with programming or coding is around five to seven years, depending on the kid’s understanding and reading capability. Like mathematics, programming also helps children open to problem-solving methods and think more logically, which can benefit them in the future.

• The Outrun project was started to demonstrate the development process when using the unified design and development tools that Qt offers, by creating a digital cockpit from early design to UI implementation, visual effect creation, building connectivity, and finally running it on various environments.

• The last step in the Outrun project development is connecting the UI to the vehicle platform. Currently the Qt for Android Automotive module provides vehicle properties through both C++ and QML APIs. It also offers a submodule to access Android notifications (to be released later). If we analogize the project to solving a jigsaw puzzle, connecting the UI to the vehicle would be the last pieces of the puzzle. You probably know that placing the final pieces of a jigsaw puzzle should be much easier than the first pieces.

• This is the eighth 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. We’re going to learn how to avoid unqualified access now.

• You will see quite a few warnings on unqualified access when compiling Qt Creator with qmlsc enabled. An access to a name in QML is called “unqualified” if the name is neither found in the directly surrounding QML scope, nor an ID or a type name. Usually this means you’re accessing members of the root element of a component, context properties, or undeclared signal parameters. Most of those are easy to fix. Let’s look at the TimeMarks.qml file in the tracing library.

• Altreus was looking for a way to convert a list of bitmask names, provided as a string by the user, to a bitmask. He wished for BUILDARGS, as provided by Perl’s Moose but was given good advise how to solve the problem without making object instantiation even more complex. Nobody can stop me from doing just that.

Rust

• With the new additions to the team, we should be able to handle our long PR queue better.

• [...]

• At the same time, we recently granted some of our oldest members the well-deserved alumni status. We want to thank Pascal Hertleif and Martin Carton for all their contributions, especially in the early days. People joining today probably never worked with them on Clippy, but without them, we probably wouldn’t be here.

• We also want to thank Philipp Hansch for their contributions to Clippy and all of the review work they’ve done over the years. To this day phansch is one of the most active Clippy contributors (measured by the number of commits).

• And finally, thank you to mikerite, who stepped down from an active reviewer/team member position but will be staying on as a contributor. We’re looking forward to continue working with them!

Leftovers

• I have a bone to pick with one of the best-known news outlets on the internet, and pick it I shall. Since 2017, Politico cofounders Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen, along with a cast of notables, have taken a brevity-driven approach to writing about the news of the day, no matter what form it takes, on a site called Axios. Much of the content is written in bullet points that are designed to focus points of communication. The company has branded this approach as something called “Smart Brevity.” Now, it would be one thing to write everything in a quick hit format, but they’ve gone further than that, attempting to sell the communication approach to businesses and even writing a book about it, as if VandeHei is friggin’ running IBM over here. As someone who once ran a popular website that specialized in brevity, I first watched this state of affairs with a sense of cynicism, then bemusement. I have written Twitter threads to remind people that, hey, they weren’t first. I can’t help but think about, given all the tools they have, how little they do with brevity! Today’s Tedium is questioning whether that alternative story form journalism has a place on the internet besides bullet points. —

Linux Foundation

• The Open Mainframe Project, an open source initiative that enables collaboration across the mainframe community to develop shared tool sets and resources, announces the schedule for the 3rd annual Open Mainframe Summit, which will be in-person in Philadelphia, PA, and streaming online for global attendees. This year’s theme focuses on security, which is top of mind for every company that uses mainframes.

• To address evolving Data and Storage needs throughout the industry, SODA Foundation, in partnership with Linux Foundation Research, is once again conducting a survey to provide insights into challenges, gaps, and trends for data and storage in the era of cloud native, edge, AI, and 5G. The results will serve to guide the SODA Foundation technical direction and ecosystem.

• Jamie Thomas is the General Manager, Systems Strategy and Development at IBM and is also the OpenSSF Board chair. She sat down with Alan Shimel of TechStrong TV during OpenSSF Day in Austin to share about OpenSSF and how the open source community is rallying together to increase the resilience of open source software.

• The Fintech Open Source Foundation (FINOS), the financial services umbrella of the Linux Foundation, announced today during its Open Source in Finance Forum (OSFF) London the launch of FDC3 2.0. FDC3 supports efficient, streamlined desktop interoperability between financial institutions with enhanced connectivity capabilities.

Entrapment (Microsoft)

• In 2001 then CEO Steve Ballmer declared: “Linux is a cancer.” Later, Microsoft sponsored SCO’s copyright attack on Linux; claimed that Linux violated unnamed Microsoft patents; and forced Linux-based Android vendors to pay for dubious patent claims. Bill Gates and Ballmer’s Microsoft wanted to see Linux and open-source software (OSS) dead and buried.

• They did it because, as Microsoft’s Halloween documents show, they believed “OSS poses a direct, short-term revenue and platform threat to Microsoft, particularly in server space.”

• Today is Microsoft’s July 2022 Patch Tuesday, and with it comes fixes for one actively exploited zero-day vulnerability and a total of 84 flaws.

Security

• Researchers at ETH Zurich discovered the vulnerabilities, which they named Retbleed. The attacks exploit vulnerabilities in retpoline, a mitigation introduced in 2018 to mitigate certain speculative execution attacks.

• Security updates have been issued by Fedora (xen), Mageia (x11-server), SUSE (chromium, kernel, pcre, pcre2, squid, and xorg-x11-server), and Ubuntu (gnupg, gnupg2, uriparser, xorg-server, xorg-server-hwe-16.04, and xorg-server, xorg-server-hwe-18.04, xwayland).

• Welcome to the June 2022 report from the Reproducible Builds project. In these reports, we outline the most important things that we have been up to over the past month. As a quick recap, whilst anyone may inspect the source code of free software for malicious flaws, almost all software is distributed to end users as pre-compiled binaries.

• We have just published Qubes Security Bulletin (QSB) 083: Retbleed: Arbitrary speculative code execution with return instructions (XSA-407). The text of this QSB is reproduced below. This QSB and its accompanying signatures will always be available in the Qubes Security Pack (qubes-secpack).

• The Xen Project has released one or more Xen Security Advisories (XSAs). The security of Qubes OS is affected. Therefore, user action is required.

Privacy/Surveillance

• This is an excellent essay outlining the post-Roe privacy threat model. (Summary: period tracking apps are largely a red herring.)

• You have probably been seeing a lot of scary news coverage about period tracker apps and databases, and you might be wondering whether or not you should be deleting your period tracking app. If you use a period tracker, but your threat model does not include the additional risks of say: helping other people get abortions, we don’t currently have evidence of imminent threats of large-scale preemptive investigation of you based on personal health app data. The biggest threat of criminalization is that a third party (like hospital staff or a relative) reports someone to the police for their pregnancy outcome — not that police find their period data in a database.

Civil Rights/Policing

• I think one can reasonably argue that the kids are dead due to DCFS, which was found in contempt by a state judge and is still in contempt of court today, months later.

• I think that there’s something poetic about the State holding itself in contempt 12 times. I mean, nothing happens because the State can’t punish itself. How does a State that has no money except what it stole from me and my spouse and millions of other Illinoisans fine itself? Where does the money it takes from itself even go? This is the kind of bullshit that only happens in government. When the judge throws the director of DCFS in prison for contempt until things start getting better or he resigns, I’ll be impressed. Until then, what is even the point?

• None of this should be a surprise. Illinois is managing child services as effectively as the State Police manage gun control (the FOID Act) and as effectively as they’re managing the roads. Letting us drive over pot craters while they’re busy causing an 11 year traffic jam at US 41 and Grand Avenue in Gurnee, because it will “help with climate change”.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

Monopolies

• Digital rights campaigners are urging US Senators to address what they consider “the fundamental problem that plagues our online ecosystem.”

• From Alphabet (parent company of Google and YouTube) to Meta (Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp), Apple, and Amazon, just a handful of US companies – known as “Big Tech” – monopolize the market.

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal

Technical

Programming

• I am a great admirer of Gtk+ and have always felt that it is simply the best and most comprehensive toolkit available in the open source ecosystem. One might argue that it’s the best toolkit period. That said, there have been a few things over the years that have left me scratching my head, and one of them was that when Gtk4 was released it saw the deprecation of the GtkFileChooserButton.

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