● 07.15.22

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 15/07/2022: Inkscape 1.2.1 is Out, BMW Joins Yocto Project

Posted in News Roundup at 5:40 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

• It’s not much of an exaggeration to say that the whole world is built on top of the Linux kernel—although most people have never heard of it.

• It is one of the very first programs that load when most computers power up. It enables the hardware running the machine to interact with the software, governs its use of resources, and acts as the foundation of the operating system.

• It is the core building block of nearly all cloud computing, virtually every supercomputer, the entire internet of things, billions of smartphones, and more.

• But the kernel is also open source, meaning anyone can write, read, and use its code. And that’s got cybersecurity experts inside the US military seriously worried. Its open-source nature means the Linux kernel—along with a host of other pieces of critical open-source software—is exposed to hostile manipulation in ways that we still barely understand. Read the full story.

Desktop/Laptop

• Tuxedo may not be a household name for many of us, but it is one of the well-known suppliers of high-performance Linux-based laptops from Germany. Earlier this year, the company introduced its Stellaris 15 Gen4 notebook aimed at performance-demanding users with an optional external liquid-cooling system. To great surprise, Tuxedo only offered the machine with Windows, but this week the company finally began to offer it with Linux, reports Phoronix.

• The Tuxedo Stellaris 15 Gen4 is a very powerful desktop replacement gaming laptop designed by Clevo. It comes packing up to Intel’s Intel Core i9-12900H processor mated with two DDR5 memory modules and two PCIe 4.0 x4 M.2 SSDs as well as Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 3080 Ti graphics chip. The machine uses a 15.6-inch display with a 2560×1440 resolution and 240Hz refresh rate to maximize the gaming experience.

• Chrome OS Flex is a special version of Google’s Chrome OS that is bringing the operating system to Windows PCs and Apple Macs.

• Linux on ChromeOS, a.k.a. Crostini, has been out of beta and available for quite some time. Users that want to leverage the flexibility and power of a Linux environment have access to a Linux terminal that opens the door to a plethora of executable packages that aren’t readily available on ChromeOS proper. Whether you’re looking to install an alternative browser or install powerful app development software, Linux on ChromeOS makes that chore a breeze.

• By default, the Linux container on ChromeOS runs the stable and secure distro known as Debian. More specifically, Debian 11 or “Bullseye.” While Debian offers many of the tools that Linux users are looking for, other distros offer up more flexibility and access to a wider range of packages without the need to add extra repositories.

Audiocasts/Shows

• Hello and welcome to Episode 474 of Linux in the Ham Shack. In this short-topics episode, the hosts discuss the utility of electrostatic discharge protection, the continued relevance of Field Day, the next QSO Today Virtual Ham Expo, Microsoft and its impact on Open Source, the Software Freedom Conservancy, WSJT-X and much more. Thank you for tuning in. We hope you have a great week.

• This week’s BSD Now gets into some history, as you can guess from the title.

• A Quick overview of deepin 20.6

Kernel Space

• Intel developers have submitted Meteor Lake graphics patches that are ready to be merged into the next version of the Linux Direct Rendering Manager (DRM-Next). Once completed, Linux 5.20 will offer initial Meteor Lake graphics support. This is yet another development that points to Meteor Lake being on track, despite some whispers from the rumor mill that it might be delayed.

• Linux-centric news site Phoronix observed Intel posting Linux driver patches for Meteor Lake support earlier this month. Now, these patches are queued for addition to the i915 kernel graphics driver.

Graphics Stack

• Glamor is a GL-based rendering acceleration library for the X server that can use OpenGL, EGL, or GBM. It uses GL functions & shaders to complete 2D graphics operations, and uses normal textures to represent drawable pixmaps where possible. Glamor calls GL functions to render to a texture directly and is somehow hardware independent. If the GL rendering cannot complete due to failure (or not being supported), then Glamor will fallback to software rendering (via llvmpipe) which uses framebuffer functions.

• You know what I’m about to talk about.

• You knew it as soon as you opened up the page.

• I’ve said I was done with it a number of times, but deep down we all knew that was a lie.

• Let’s talk about XFB.

Applications

• We’ve just resolved some critical issues in Inkscape 1.2 that were identified by our community. If you’re currently using Inkscape 1.2 then this is an important update to install on your device.

• GSS-API is a standardized framework that is used by applications to, primarily, support Kerberos V5 authentication. GSS-API is standardized by IETF and supported by protocols like SSH, SMTP, IMAP and HTTP, and implemented by software projects such as OpenSSH, Exim, Dovecot and Apache httpd (via mod_auth_gssapi). The implementations of Kerberos V5 and GSS-API that are packaged for common GNU/Linux distributions, such as Debian, include MIT Kerberos, Heimdal and (less popular) GNU Shishi/GSS.

• CalDAV is the web standard calendaring extension for the WebDAV. It allows CalDAV clients to access, manage, sync and schedule calendar events and calendars on servers.

• CalDAV synchronizes calendar data across different devices.

• In this list, we preview some of self-hosted CalDAV servers and clients that anyone can download, setup and use on their local machines or servers.

• The CardDAV is an extension for the WebDAV which allows users to sync and backup their contact from CardDAV server to several clients and multiple devices.

• Cabal is a fairly new experimental p2p protocol and messaging apps that allow user to exchange messages and files.

• It does not require any central server, or even create one, all is needed is the Cabal address which is a secret key that can be shared among friends, teams, and groups.

• Cabal works on the internet, but it works as well on your local network as you can chat directly with the users connected on the same network without the need to any internet access.

• I’ve continued working on my IRC suite this month. Two of our extensions have been accepted in IRCv3: read-marker synchronizes read markers between multiple devices belonging to the same user, and channel-context adds a machine-readable tag to indicate the context of a message. Some other server and client developers have already implemented them!

• soju has gained a few quality-of-life features. Thanks to gildarts, there is a new channel update -detached flag to attach or detach a channel, a new contrib/migrate-db script to migrate the database between backends, users can now delete their own account, and the user password hashes are upgraded when logging in. Additionally, read markers are broadcast using Web Push (to dismiss notifications when a message is read on another client), users can now set a default nickname to use for all networks, and the logic to regain the configured nick should work on servers missing MONITOR support (so I should no longer be stuck with “emersion_” on OFTC).

• Goguma now supports irc:// URLs, so it should be easier to click on these links in various project pages. If the user hasn’t joined the target channel or network yet, a confirmation dialog will be displayed. In the network settings page, a new button opens a UI to authenticate on the IRC network. A ton of other minor fixes and improvements have been pushed as well.

Instructionals/Technical

• Standard Notes is an open-source encrypted notes app. In this tutorial, you will learn how to self-host your standard notes server on a Ubuntu 22.04 machine.

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to enable the EPEL repository on Rocky Linux 9. For those of you who didn’t know, Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux (or EPEL) is a package repository that provides additional packages that are not included in standard Rocky Linux, AlmaLinux OS, CentOS, Oracle Linux, and Scientific Linux. EPEL uses much of the same infrastructure as Fedora, including buildsystem, Bugzilla instance, updates manager, mirror manager and more.

• 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 EPEL repository on Rocky Linux. 9.

• Emacs is a brilliant program that can do many things including handling files. With the Emacs Multimedia System (EMMS) package, you can also handle your music in Emacs. You can easily browse music directories, create song playlists and even display lyrics. Here we will show you how to play music in Emacs.

• Linux Mint is far more than just the Cinnamon desktop with a bit of green sprinkled on top. It also includes a number of homegrown apps crafted by Mint developers to enhance the overall experience.

• Nemo file manager is probably the best known tool in Mint’s software stable (as it’s available to install from the Ubuntu archives). But other useful tools include Bulky, Warpinator, and Hypnotix. These are well-designed, user-friendly apps ably tailored to their respective tasks but are not available in the regular Ubuntu repos.

• The good news is that you don’t have to switch to Linux Mint to use some or even all of these apps. The beauty of open-source software (especially Mint’s, which is engineered to be distro-agnostic) is that you can install (almost) anything wherever you like.

• I’ve been wanting to use my brand new NitroKey 3, but TOTP is not supported yet. So, I’m looking to implement it myself, since firmware and tooling are open-source.

• NitroKey 3’s firmware is based on Trussed framework. In essence, it’s been designed so that anyone can implement an independent Trussed application. Each such application is like a module that can be added to Trussed-based product. So if I write a Trussed app, I’d be able to add it to NK3’s firmware.

• Today we are looking at how to install Project Slippi on a Chromebook. Please follow the video/audio guide as a tutorial where we explain the process step by step and use the commands below.

Games

• While platforms like Steam are very easy to publish for, the reality is that most of the revenue from independent developers generally comes from consoles (this, of course, speaking of devs not focusing on mobile).

• Consoles are cheap, easy to get access to, and have a wide catalog of first and third party titles, making them ideal devices for players wanting to spend their time and money on games.

Desktop Environments/WMs

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• I am pleased to announce that TWIG is having its first anniversary! 52 weeks ago, 52 TWIG issues later, or to put it simply – one year ago I launched TWIG!

• The first issue was published on July 16, 2021, and was named “#1 Scrolling in the Dark”. After discussing the concept with some other GNOME contributors, we had to search for “news” in order to have enough material for the first issue.

• Now, one year later, it gives me great pleasure to announce that we have set a new record for news on the anniversary. There has never been that many news as this week in the whole year! I am cautiously optimistic, and claim the concept has now become established in the GNOME community, and is being used by more and more projects to quickly and easily announce news.

• What do you think about TWIG? Do you have any suggestions for improvements? Criticism? Compliments? Let us know! You can contact us in our Matrix #thisweek:gnome.org room anytime!

• But now to the actual news – Next year is sure to be at least as exciting!

Distributions and Operating Systems

SUSE/OpenSUSE

• Dear Tumbleweed users and hackers,

• During this week we managed to release a snapshot every day. Granted, some were relatively small, but overall, there were some nice updates in the 7 snapshots published (0708…0714).

• I’m excited to share that SLES was recognized by G2, the world’s largest and most trusted tech marketplace, as the Leader in its Server Virtualization Software category and the High Performer in the Infrastructure-as-a-Service category.

Fedora Family / IBM

• Red Hat Inc. sprang a surprise today as it announced that Matt Hicks has been promoted to be its new president and chief executive officer, effective immediately.

• Hicks (pictured) takes the reins from current president and CEO Paul Cormier, who has moved upstairs to become the open-source software provider’s new chairman.

• Red Hat is a subsidiary of IBM Corp. and seen as one of the pioneers of open-source software. Its flagship product is the Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating system, which is widely used to power thousands of enterprise data centers around the world. The company also sells tools around virtualization, software containers, middleware and various other applications. It was acquired by IBM in 2019 for $34 billion.

• IBM CEO Arvind Krishna said Red Hat serves as the foundation of thousands of enterprises’ technology strategies thanks to its open-source, hybrid cloud capabilities. “Matt’s deep experience and technical knowledge of Red Hat’s entire portfolio makes him the ideal leader as Red Hat continues to grow and develop innovative, industry-leading software,” he said.

• The Rocky Enterprise Software Foundation has released Rocky Linux 9 and the Peridot build platform. Learn more.

• Repositories are like huge servers where the developers store the application files. In Linux, the repositories play a vital role in app performance and installation. From my previous experiences, I’ve faced issues while installing applications due to a bad or broken repository. Most major Linux distributions have their own dedicated official Linux repository. Despite having their own dedicated repository for Fedora, CentOS, or Red Hat Linux, we might need to rely on some thirdparty YUM repositories for package installation via YUM commands.

EasyOS

• An important feature of EasyOS is “hardware profiling”, so that when on a USB-stick that is booted on different computers, different video, audio, etc hardware is detected and remembered.

• In response to issue #196, mintsuki has created a new executable, ‘limine-version’, that just returns the version of Limine. In response to #197, mintsuki has added “–undeploy” commandline option to the ‘limine-deploy’ executable. This will remove Limine from the mbr to which it was installed, and restore the mbr to how it was prior. With some caveats. Both of these are great new features, and will be incorporated into the “Limine Installer”.

Debian Family

• Another terminal based graphical activity monitor, inspired by gtop and vtop, written in Go.

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

• Linux Mint 21 codename “Vanessa” has its first Beta out. Mint 21 has a lot of new and exciting things to offer, such as a new version of the Linux kernel, updated drivers, an updated Cinnamon desktop, and more.

• In this guide, we’ll show you how you can try out the Linux Mint 21 beta. However, be warned that this software is still developing, and you will run into issues. Be sure to report these issues so Mint developers can improve the OS for the final release.

Open Hardware/Modding

• Traditional control of RC cars and other small vehicles has typically relied on some kind of joystick-based solution, often with one for adjusting direction and the other for speed. But YouTuber James Bruton wanted to do something different: make a rideable go-kart that is entirely driven with one’s voice.

• His solution is based around Deepgram’s speech recognition service, which enables users to send small snippets of audio samples up to its cloud via an API and receive replies with a transcript of what was said. As for the kart itself, its chassis was created by first welding together several steel tubes and attaching a based of thick plywood on top. The front cutout allows for a large caster wheel to spin left or right with the aid of a chain driven by a repurposed windshield wiper motor assembly. Absolute positioning of this wheel was achieved by measuring the voltage of a potentiometer that spins along with the chain. And finally, a pair of hub motor wheels, akin to the ones found on hoverboards and scooters, were placed at the rear for propulsion. Each motor was connected to its specific driver, and in turn, were connected to an Arduino Uno.

• The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is one of the greatest tools we have for capturing deep space images with extreme accuracy—capable of detecting radiation from the cosmic microwave background. Early images have made their way back to Earth and the maker behind Cellar Nerd is displaying these wonderous images on a custom, Raspberry Pi-powered JWST-themed digital picture frame designed to resemble the hexagonal golden mirror array found on the telescope.

• Arduino Cloud updates are like buses! They all come along at once. But that just makes it all the more exciting when we get to tell you about the new things happening in Arduino’s awesome SaaS system. So let’s jump right in there and take a look at tags, filters, blinks and galleries.

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

Content Management Systems (CMS)

• LinuxLinks, like most modern websites, is dynamic in that content is stored in a database and converted into presentation-ready HTML when readers access the site.

• While we employ built-in server caching which creates static versions of the site, we don’t generate a full, static HTML website based on raw data and a set of templates. However, sometimes a full, static HTML website is desirable. Because HTML pages are all prebuilt, they load extremely quickly in web browsers.

• There are lots of other advantages of running a full, static HTML website.

Programming/Development

• This is the 103rd issue of syslog-ng Insider, a monthly newsletter that brings you syslog-ng-related news.

• Occasionally I see upstream developers complain that a downstream operating system has built their software “incorrectly,” generally because some important dependency or feature has been disabled. Sometimes downstreams really do mess up, but more often poor upstream defaults are to blame. Upstreams must set good defaults because upstream software developers know far more about their projects than downstream packagers do. Upstreams generally have a good idea of how they expect software to be built by downstreams, whereas downstreams generally do not. Accordingly, do the thinking upstream whenever possible. When you set good defaults, it becomes easier for downstreams to build your software the way you expect, because active effort is required for downstreams to mess things up.

• On their partnership with the Bona Ubuntu Program Prof Greyling says: “This must be one of the most special moments in the five years of our project.” Special thanks, he says, go to Leva Foundation’s Operations Manager Jackson Tshabalala for arranging it.

• In a very early prototype the challenge on the screen is simulated by a physical grid, while “braille tags” are added to the tokens.

• Qt 6.4 includes the new module Qt Quick 3D Physics as tech preview. As the name implies, this is a module that adds physical simulation capabilities on top of Qt Quick 3D. In particular, it enables rigid body simulation using simple primitives (spheres, boxes, planes and capsules) as well as convex- and triangle meshes and heightmaps. Physical properties such as mass, density, gravity and friction are customizable. This makes it possible to create physically correct behavior in 3D scenes without having to handcraft animations.

Perl / Raku

• Three members of the Debian Perl Group met in Hamburg between May 23 and May 30 2022 as part of the Debian Reunion Hamburg to continue perl development work for Bookworm and to work on QA tasks across our 3800+ packages.

Leftovers

• Have a listen to this classic hold music on infinite loop and be taken back to a time when pay phones ruled the street corner and peppered the mall food court.

Hardware

• A long time ago, when we first started The Next Platform, Urs Hölzle, then senior vice president of the Technical Infrastructure team at Google, told us that to gain a 20 percent improvement in price/performance it would absolutely change from the X86 architecture to Power architecture – or indeed any other architecture – and even for one generation of machines.

Proprietary

Pseudo-Open Source

Openwashing

• The company that still owns Digital Research’s CP/M operating system has granted a new, more permissive license for the eight-bit OS, making it free for anyone to modify or redistribute.

• It’s not often that we update a news story from 21 years ago. Bryan Sparks, then CEO of Caldera spin-off Lineo, gave Tim Olstead permission to redistribute the OS, both as source and binaries. Sadly, Mr. Olstead passed away from cancer aged just 51. Back then, we wrote that the Unofficial CP/M Web Site was back, as Mr. Sparks changed the permissions from the former owner himself to the site as a whole.

• For clarity, that’s a very good thing – Lineo was under no obligation to do this – but restricting redistribution to one person or one site was limiting.

• Lineo in turn spun off DRDOS, Inc., which ended up owning the Digital Research intellectual property. That company is still around, and Mr Sparks is its president. This month, retired programmer Scott Chapman managed to contact Sparks and request clarification of whether anyone else was allowed to redistribute CP/M, and Sparks has granted free rein.

• penProject is a powerful, open-source…

• Incident automation company Shoreline.io has unveiled its open source solutions library, a collection of op packs designed to make it easier to diagnose and repair the most common infrastructure incidents in production cloud environments.

• The solutions library focuses on addressing issues including JVM memory leaks, filling disks, rogue processes and stuck Kubernetes pods. It is launching with over 35 op packs that are available for free to the Shoreline community.

• The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, today announced that BMW Group is joining the Yocto Project as a member.

Security

• Penetration testing stands for a process where the security of a computer system is tested by trying to gain access to its internal systems. In order to carry out penetration testing, an attacker must first identify which ports are open on the target machine and then use those ports in order to exploit security vulnerabilities. Once these vulnerabilities are exploited, the attacker can break into the target computer and try different passwords or commands in an attempt to find sensitive information that may be stored there.

• With the latest update of IPFire, a new feature is available which helps to make OpenVPN connections more secure: OpenVPN Two-Factor Authentication (2FA). This post explains what Two-Factor Authentication is, what it is good for, and how to use it with IPFire and OpenVPN.

• It’s 2022 and you have a smart home. Given all of the stories about IoT devices getting hacked or hijacked with malware, are your router and home network prepared to protect your home? If you have an older router or don’t use advanced features of a more modern one, maybe not. With that in mind, here are some different ways to bolster your smart home device security — assuming your router has the right features.

• To be clear, the primary goal here is to keep any network intrusions limited solely to infected devices. You don’t want some malicious actor entering your home network through an IoT device and gaining access to your other devices or your network data.

• I’m an egalitarian. I worked hard to be where I am, but I also want to give people the same opportunities I had. Free, universal education is one of the hallmarks of a compassionate, civilised society; one in which your character, skills, and interests are all that matter in the pursuit of knowledge and improvement of lives.

Privacy/Surveillance

• This week’s show comes to y’all from Paris and the English seaside, with Kevin and I wondering exactly what happened to Wink. We also offer options for the few remaining holdouts on the platform. We then discuss Hive’s decision to pull back on smart home devices and its new smart thermostat (Hive plans to continue making smart energy devices). Then we focus on surveillance news starting with San Francisco’s Rule’s Committee broadening support for law enforcement agencies to access Ring camera data. Then we share how often police got access to Ring device footage without the owner’s permission. The Federal Trade Commission has a warning for companies that say they anonymize their data when in fact, they do not, and Home Assistant now has a program for formal integrations. We also share our perspectives on BMW charging a monthly fee for access to heated seats. We end by answering a listener question about network extenders.

Environment

Energy

Civil Rights/Policing

• Democracies are challenged all over the world because of the growing inequalities between citizens. Political freedom without socioeconomic justice that enables every citizen to feel respected and heard, is unsustainable. Our country is reaping the bitter fruits of neglecting socioeconomic transformation to make freedom a lived reality for all citizens.

• 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

----------

➮ Sharing is caring. Content is available under CC-BY-SA.