● 07.14.22

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 14/07/2022: Rocky Linux 9 and GNOME Builder 43 Alpha

Posted in News Roundup at 11:43 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Desktop/Laptop

• The Spanish-based company, Slimbook, has made available their next generation Slimbook Executive Linux ultrabooks with a 12th Gen Intel Alder Lake CPU.

• Slimbook, the company well known for producing KDE Plasma-powered laptops, has given their Executive series a bit of a refresh by making them available with the 12 Gen Intel Alder Lake CPU. This new iteration adds considerably more power (14 Cores, 20 threads, 24MB cache, and up to 4.80 GHz clock speeds), improved battery life, and better graphics (via an integrated Iris Xe 4K chipset). Consumers will find 2 different models available with this configuration: A 14″ 3K display, running at a 90Hz refresh rate (at 2880 x 1800 resolution) and a 16″ model that sports NVIDIA RTX 3050Ti graphics with 4GB GDDR6 RAM (also at a 90 Hz refresh rate).

• This month: * Command & Conquer * How-To : Python, Blender and Latex * Graphics : Inkscape * Everyday Ubuntu : Ubuntu Software Centre * Micro This Micro That * Review : Kubuntu 22.04 * Review : Fedora 35 * Review : Ebook Readers * My Story : Calibre

Audiocasts/Shows

• Why Google says we should all go rolling, Red Hat’s got a new boss, Microsoft gets called out, and why it might be the year of Linux hardware.

• Differences between base and ports LLVM in OpenBSD, Netgraph for FreeBSD’s bhyve Networking, Audio on FreeBSD – Quick Guide, FreeBSD’s Legend starts at 1.0, Hacker News running by FreeBSD, TrueNAS 13, and more

Kernel Space

• Now DARPA, the US military’s research arm, wants to understand the collision of code and community that makes these open-source projects work, in order to better understand the risks they face. The goal is to be able to effectively recognize malicious actors and prevent them from disrupting or corrupting crucially important open-source code before it’s too late.

• DARPA’s “SocialCyber” program is an 18-month-long, multimillion-dollar project that will combine sociology with recent technological advances in artificial intelligence to map, understand, and protect these massive open-source communities and the code they create. It’s different from most previous research because it combines automated analysis of both the code and the social dimensions of open-source software.

• “The open-source ecosystem is one of the grandest enterprises in human history,” says Sergey Bratus, the DARPA program manager behind the project.

Instructionals/Technical

• Start Monitoring your server systems and network devices by installing the Sensu Go Monitoring tool on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy JellyFish or 20.04 Focal fossa.

• The Wifi module comes with multiple modes and one of them is monitor mode, which you have commonly heard from security enthusiasts to sniff over a network using Wireshark.

• Docker is an open-source tool that helps you to build, test and deploy applications in containerized environments. However, there are lots of unused containers, images, volumes, and networks that may reside in your system. They consume a significant amount of disk space of the host operating system. Docker does not remove those objects without cleaning up it manually.

• It is a good habit to clean up these unused disk spaces regularly and keep your system organized. Docker has several commands to clean up those unused objects.

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to remove Docker images, containers, and volumes.

• There are a lot of commands for running and managing a Docker container. If you are new to Docker then it is very difficult for you to deal with Docker commands. “Stop and remove all docker containers” is a day-to-day task of any Docker administrator. So it is essential for you to know how to remove and stop all docker containers. In this post, we will show you how to remove and stop all containers.

• This tutorial continues Calc Basics V and now we will learn a new formula namely ROUND. With this, we can simplify numbers. For example, we will simplify student scores based on the previous AVERAGE exercise. As a reminder, if you haven’t followed this LibreOffice Calc series, read the first and second parts here. Now let’s exercise again.

Desktop Environments/WMs

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• It’s been an absolute mad dash this cycle porting Builder to GTK 4, but 43.alpha0 is out and available on GNOME Nightly.

• Builder is one of the larger applications within GNOME, especially if you include the libraries I had to write and maintain to make that possible. Porting an application to a new toolkit is always a big undertaking. However, it also provides an opportunity to rethink how major components work and simplify them while you’re there.

• So that is what has happened this cycle. It’s going to end up being a much more polished product due to the enormous amount of simplification going on.

• GTK 4 has simplified how a lot of things work and provided APIs that feel so obvious when you use them.

Distributions and Operating Systems

• We give you the ten best Linux distro(s) for beginners, which can be the perfect starting point and help you to pick the best of the lot.

Red Hat

• Based on the freely distributed sources of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 operating system series, Rocky Linux 9 is here with GNOME 40 as the default desktop environment, support for Direct Access (DAX) operations in XFS for direct access to byte-addressable persistent memory, as well as the “eager write” mount option in NFS to help reduce latency.

• Security-wise, Rocky Linux 9 series disables root user authentication with a password over SSH by default to prevent attackers from gaining access using brute-force password attacks, and OpenSSL 3.0 support.

• I did the RHCE exam some time ago, and still there are some tricks and advices I tell the people to bear in mind some of the things I used and that were also provided in the Red Hat Enterprise 8 Administration book:

• Don’t remember every step, it’s not effective, for example as I don’t recall syntax for BIND, I do remember package that has some files with examples and I use that one to check what I need to do

• A little over a year ago, Rocky Linux arrived, and it was an instant hit. Rocky Linux, the brainchild of CentOS co-founder and high-performance computing (HPC) veteran Gregory Kurtzer has come a long way since then. First, the Linux distro became available on the major public clouds. Now, Rocky Linux 9, a Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 9 clone, has arrived.

• But, Rocky Linux 9 is not just another RHEL clone. True, like its rivals, such as AlmaLinux 9, it is based on CentOS Stream and duplicates RHEL 9′s functionality. But, to me, the real killer difference is that the new Rocky Linux comes with an open-source build system called Peridot.

• It takes more than a promotion or job title to make a great leader. The best are those who constantly strive to improve their leadership skills – and who are thoughtful in their words, actions, and how they show up for their people every day.

• Recently, finalists in the 2022 National CIO of the Year ORBIE Awards each shared a piece of advice they had collected over their careers. We’ve rounded up the 9 best quotes on leadership below. Read on, or download the complete quote book for advice on leadership, soft skills, career development, strategy, and more.

• This issue in a monthly column covers improvements in Apache Kafka, including the release in progress, 3.3.0, and recent Kafka Improvement Proposals.

• This is a summary of the work done on initiatives by the CPE Team. Each quarter CPE Team together with CentOS and Fedora community representatives choose initiatives that will be being worked on in this quarter. The CPE Team is then split into multiple smaller sub-teams that will work on chosen initiatives + day to day work that needs to be done.

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

• The Lubuntu Team is happy to announce that the Lubuntu Backports PPA is now available as a beta. Please see details below to help us test it.

• As of July 14, 2022, all flavors of Ubuntu 21.10, including Ubuntu Studio 21.10, codenamed “Impish Indri”, have reached end-of-life (EOL). There will be no more updates of any kind, including security updates, for this release of Ubuntu.

• If you have not already done so, please upgrade to Ubuntu Studio 22.04 LTS via the instructions provided here.

• No single release of any operating system can be supported indefinitely, and Ubuntu Studio has no exception to this rule.

• Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue 743 for the week of July 3 – 9, 2022.

• Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue 742 for the week of June 26 – July 2, 2022.

• Google details the benefits of moving from “big bang” OS upgrades to rolling releases. It saved its engineers from burn out.

Devices/Embedded

• By today’s standards, the necessities for running a Linux-based operating system are surprisingly meagre in terms of RAM and processor power. Back in the day we ran earlier Linux versions on Intel 386 and 486 machines with tiny quantities of memory compared to the multi-gigabyte many-core powerhouses we do today.

• So it stands to reason that many of the more powerful microcontrollers should also run Linux, but of course they are often unable because the lack a memory management unit. The original ESP32 is just such a candidate, plenty of power but unable to run Linux. Not so fast, because [Dror Gluska] has managed to boot a Linux kernel on Espressif’s dual-core chip. How on earth? By emulating a RISC-V processor on it and booting a RISC-V version of the kernel.

Open Hardware/Modding

• At the beginning of the year, we wrote about WCH CH32V307 RISC-V microcontroller and a development board with 8 UART ports controlled over Ethernet. I’ve now been informed of a similar, but much more compact by VCC-GND Studio named “YD-CH32V307VCT6”.

• Besides the 144 MHz RISC-V microcontroller, the board features a 10Mbps Ethernet port, two USB Type-C ports, SPI flash, EEPROM, a microSD card socket, and four rows of 24 pins each for a total of 96 pins exposing all pins out of the LQFP100 package.

• ΔMIDI 001:model D is an Arduino-based MIDI controller inspired by the Minimoog Model D synthesizer first introduced in the early 1970’s, but not in production anymore.

• The MIDI controller is compatible with VST (Virtual Studio Technology) plugins designed for the Minimoog synthesizer, DAWs (Digital Audio Workstation), and as an open-source, can be directly modified or tweaked by its user.

• The can2040 project is a software CAN bus implementation for the Raspberry Pi RP2040 microcontroller that leverages programmable I/Os (PIO) to achieve reading and writing CAN 2.0B data frames at rates up to 1Mbit per second.

• Kevin O’Connor, the developer of the project, further explains the implementation uses only one of the two RP2040 PIO hardware blocks, so it is possible for a single Raspberry Pi RP2040 chip to have two separate CAN bus interfaces.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

•  Matrix is an open-source standard for decentralized communication. It is constantly evolving to the requirements of modern solutions keeping in mind the privacy of users.

• You will find Matrix clients as a replacement for Slack, Microsoft Teams, and several other popular communication platforms.

• And, to re-affirm the adoption of decentralized communication, Matrix has announced that it has surpassed sixty-million users worldwide.

•  Lisp (derives from “LISt Processing”) is one of the oldest programming languages. It was invented in 1958, with the language being conceived by John McCarthy and is based on his paper “Recursive Functions of Symbolic Expressions and Their Computation by Machine”. Over the years, Lisp has evolved into a family of programming languages. The most commonly used general-purpose dialects are Common Lisp and Scheme. Other dialects include Franz Lisp, Interlisp, Portable Standard Lisp, XLISP and Zetalisp.

• Here’s our recommended web frameworks for Lisp captured in a legendary Linuxlinks chart. We only feature free and open source software.

•  As the Development COE lead, I consider the expertise, structure and capabilities needed to make software development successful across hundreds of developers. We have roughly 600 people in the broader development team, but I’m not directly responsible for managing them. I’m responsible for defining how they will do their job. So for development best practices, standards unification and so on.

• Our transformation project. We have the current bank, which is built on typical legacy banking systems that are huge, distributed monolithic architecture systems. That is where most of our developers (around 400) are working day-to-day as it generates the bulk of the revenue for the bank.

• Alongside the legacy applications, we decided to completely modernize to something that we call “Digital Hub” which is replacing the bank’s current infrastructure. The front-end applications are native mobile and web applications.

Programming/Development

• On my weekly call with mentors today, I showed them how my Space bar works and I recieved some suggestions.

• One point of discussion was that clicking on a Space icon for first time resulted in noticeable delay before the UI was updated with filtered room list. The cause was traced to the latency introduced by /hierarchy api call.

• On July 9th, I created a merge request to submit all the work I did to add Space bar. The first issue was that CI builds failed because CI image has libQuotient 0.6 which doesn’t support the Space /hierarchy call. As suggested by Tobias, getting around it was easy, as I could guard relevant code inside #ifdef QUOTIENT_07. This got the CI build passing.

• Reactide is a cross-platform desktop application that offers a simulator, made for live reloading and quick React component prototyping.

• The IDE is built to aid developers produce rapid React-based application as it streamlines the development, offers components visualization, simple configuration, and comes with a built-in development server reactide-server.

• React brings an integrated suite of development tools to streamline react development. The days of flipping between browser, IDE, and server are over.

• There are many WYSIWYG content editors out there, however, this one is not your typical editor, it is a block editor that is similar to WordPress content block editor, and the best part it is free and open-source.

• There are many theories about why the C programming language has endured for as long as it has. Maybe it’s the austerity of its syntax or the simplicity of its vocabulary. Or maybe it’s that C is often seen as a utilitarian language, something that’s rugged and ready to be used as a building material for something that needs no platform because it’s going to be its own foundation. C is clearly a powerful language, and I think its longevity has a little something to do with the way it serves as a springboard for other popular technologies. Here are five of my favorite technologies that utilize and rely upon C, and how they can each help you learn more about C yourself.

Python

• How do you run a Python program in the Linux terminal? Like this, right?

Shell/Bash/Zsh/Ksh

• Run a command as soon as another long-running command finishes. E.g. suspend the machine after performing apt upgrade. The process is selected interactively via fzf.

• Researchers have open-sourced pa.sh (also called pash), a tool that can dramatically speed up Linux scripts by using parallelization, saving time and without risk of introducing errors.

• The process of parallelization first examines a script for code that can be run separately and independently, so not all scripts can benefit from the tool. But when pa.sh does find portions that can run independently, it runs them in parallel on separate CPUs. It also uses other techniques to get the code to run faster.

• Sometimes I want to copy a command I previously typed on my shell to the clipboard. It may be for documentation, note taking, writing a script, setting up an Ansible playbook, sending to someone… You name it.

Rust

Leftovers

• A few weeks ago, the Blockchain Research Institute (BRI) announced that its annual global conference would be renamed Web3 Blockchain World, and that the Enterprise Blockchain Awards would now be called the Web3 & Blockchain Transformation Awards.

• I’ve been affiliated with BRI for a number of years as a research contributor and as chair of its blockchain awards committee. I was somewhat concerned with the name change, because, as is generally true of new technologies in their early stages, there are multiple views of what web3 is all about. Critics view web3 as little more than hype, a rebranding effort to shed some of the cultural and political baggage of crypto, while supporters believe that web3 represents the future of the internet, upending traditional gatekeepers and ushering a middleman-free digital economy.

Security

• “Pass the SALT” (PTS) is a small IT security conference in Lille, France. It has less participants than speakers at the RSA conference. I gave talks at both events. RSA is a lot more prestigious event, but I still prefer PTS. Why?

• CRYPTO-GRAM is a free monthly newsletter providing summaries, analyses, insights, and commentaries on computer security and cryptography. In this issue, Random Notes on the SQL Slammer, The Importance of Authentication, and a nice analysis of Matt Blaze’s door locks attack in Locks and Full Disclosure. “I’d rather have as much information as I can to make an informed decision about security. I’d rather have the information I need to pressure vendors to improve security. I don’t want to live in a world where locksmiths can sell me a master key system that they know doesn’t work or where the government can implement security measures without accountability.”. . .

• Security updates have been issued by Debian (request-tracker4), Fedora (kernel and vim), Mageia (gerbv, gnupg2, pgadmin4, and python-coookiecutter), Slackware (xorg), SUSE (cifs-utils, gmp, gnutls, libnettle, kernel, libsolv, libzypp, zypper, logrotate, openssl-1_1, opera, squid, and virglrenderer), and Ubuntu (ca-certificates, git, linux, linux-aws, linux-aws-hwe, linux-azure, linux-azure-4.15, linux-gcp-4.15, linux-hwe, linux-kvm, linux-oracle, linux-raspi2, linux-snapdragon, linux, linux-aws, linux-azure, linux-azure-5.4, linux-azure-fde, linux-gke, linux-gkeop, linux-hwe-5.4, linux-ibm, linux-kvm, linux, linux-aws, linux-azure, linux-gcp, linux-gke, linux-ibm, linux-kvm, linux-lowlatency, linux-oracle, linux-aws, linux-oem-5.14, and vim).

• Containerized environments can be relatively complex to secure, particularly for enterprise teams used to more traditional network security processes and strategies. There was initial optimism that containerized infrastructure would actually be more inherently secure because microservices are limited in function and can be hardened. The reality, though, has proved otherwise.

• Here are five reasons why securing container and Kubernetes environments requires new approaches that must diverge from—and go beyond—traditional security capabilities.

Privacy/Surveillance

• China is selling less to Russia, but buying from its internationally-isolated neighbor at an “elevated pace.” That’s according to a Reuters analysis of the latest figures issued by the Chinese customs authorities. Chinese imports from Russia jumped 56 percent in June versus the same month a year ago, in addition to a surge of 80 percent in May. Much of it is thanks to China’s energy needs, particularly in oil and gas. On the other hand, Chinese businesses appear cautious when it comes to selling things to Russia — partly because of Russia’s dire economic situation, but also out of concerns about such activities attracting the (threats of) sanctions from the West. Getting energy from Russia, after all, is not sanctionable. Just look at Germany, which says it will keep buying Russia oil until 31 December.

• [...]

• IN HOT WATER: Italy’s data protection authority has warned TikTok that it may have breached EU privacy laws with its plan to use personal data stored on users’ devices for personalized ads without explicit consent, my colleague Antoaneta Roussi reports.

• The issue: In an update to its privacy policy, TikTok, which is owned by Chinese company ByteDance, informed users that starting yesterday (July 13), those over the age of 18 would be targeted by personal advertizing based on their behavior on the app. The legal basis for processing the data would no longer be consent, but rather the “legitimate interest” of TikTok and its partners, the company announced.

• A fast-tracked investigation by the Italian authority found that TikTok’s policy was incompatible with the European e-Privacy Directive, which requires individual consent for access to information on a user’s device. It also notified the European Data Protection Board and the Irish privacy authority (which formally oversees TikTok in Europe) to consider further action since the move was incompatible with the European General Data Protection Regulation.

Censorship/Free Speech

• IN JUNE, TWITTER received an ultimatum from the Indian government to remove some 39 accounts and content from its platform. Sources familiar with the order say it outlined that if Twitter refused to comply, its chief compliance officer could face criminal proceedings. They say it also stated that the company would lose its “safe harbor” protections, meaning it would no longer be protected from liability for the content created by its own users. This is an escalation of a series of “blocking orders,” or content removal orders, sent by the Indian Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, which have increased significantly in the past 18 months.

• Last week, Twitter responded: It will take the Indian government to court.

• While the dispute itself deals with only specific accounts and pieces of content, experts told WIRED that its outcome could have major repercussions, and serve as a “bellwether for this ongoing battle about internet freedom,” says Allie Funk, research director for technology and democracy at Freedom House.

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal

• I’d like to discuss a mental somersault that I’ve found has caused me a lot of grief in the past, which is prescriptive descriptions.

• I have never really used email for more than making online accounts and work related stuff. Skype,,Discord, Facebook, text and calls were the vehicles of my communication for many years. This year I have been making a concious effort to go back to the humble email to talk to people.

• [...]

• Email is kind of like a digital post card to me.

Technical

Internet/Gemini

• Quite everyone agrees that nowadays you need a several megabyte internet speed, or if you’re privileged you have several hundred megabytes. But what for?

• The internet got gradually faster, while the websites got gradually slower and more bloated. Even if you have a decent internet connection by today’s standards, try loading any “modern” website and you’ll wait a good dozen of seconds, then you will be bombarded with ads and trackers.

• This is why I’ve switched to text-based browsers. Aside from obvious advantages like no ads, cookies, javascript etc. I don’t participate in any monopoly either. I currently fluctuate between w3m and lynx, both with their pros and cons. Nonetheless, I mostly browse Gemini than use HTTP.

• Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It’s like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter. Share in other sites/networks: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. Permalink  Send this to a friend

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