● 07.24.22

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 25/07/2022: NuTyX 22.07.0 and Last RC for Upcoming Linux Release

Posted in News Roundup at 8:38 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

• Welcome to this week’s Linux Weekly Roundup.

• We have a good week in the world of Linux releases with Garuda Linux 220717 and Pardus 21.3.

• I hope you have a wonderful week and a lovely summer!

Audiocasts/Shows

• **kdiamond** , **kdnssd** , **kdoctools** , **keditbookmarks** , **kemoticons** , **kfilemetadata** , **kfind** , **kfloppy** , **kfourinline** from Slackware set **kde**.

• In this video, we are looking at how to install Krita on Pop!_OS 22.04.

• Josh and Kurt talk about Microsoft creating a policy of not allowing anyone to charge for open source in their app store. This policy was walked back quickly, but it raises some questions about how fair or unfair open source really is. It’s mostly unfair to developers if you look at the big picture.

• Paul Copplestone is Co-Founder & CEO of Supabase the open source Backend-as-a-Service company that provides storage, authentication, edge functions, and a postgres database to users.

• Supabase’s project, also called supabase, has 36K stars on GitHub and is positioned as the “open source Firebase alternative”.

• One of the interesting changes between Wayland and Xorg is how Wayland decided to merge compositing and window management into 1 component, but why is that?

Kernel Space

• The 5.19-rc8 kernel prepatch is out for testing. “There’s nothing really surprising in here – a few smaller fixups for the retbleed mess as expected, and the usual random one-liners elsewhere.”

Applications

• For those want to unlock / decrypt PDF files, there’s now a stupid simple graphical tool to do the job in Linux.

• It’s easy to encrypt you PDF files in Ubuntu Linux since the built-in LibreOffice office suite has the option on ‘Export as PDF’ dialog. However, there seems no easy way to remove password for PDF file, other than using qpdf command:

• qpdf –decrypt –password=<PASSWORD> input.pdf output.pdf unlockR is a new GTK4 application that use Libadwaita to provide a modern simple user interface to decrypt your PDF files.

• Streaming music online may have become the primary way many people listen to music, but MP3 files haven’t gone away. It’s still easy to purchase and download most songs, DRM-free, to your computer. From there, you can listen to them on just about any device with storage space and a speaker.

Instructionals/Technical

• While Debian is stable by default, it gets this stability by relying on older versions of software packages. There are times when you might want newer software. Fortunately, it’s easy to switch from Debian Stable to Testing to get the latest versions of software on your system.

• Apple’s iPhone and iPad use the HEIC image format to compress high-quality images. Unfortunately, many apps and computer operating systems don’t support this format. As a result, many people convert HEIC files to JPG and PNG. Here’s how to do it on Linux.

• [...]

• An image converter is the best way to convert Apple‘s HEIC images (High Efficiency Image Format) on Linux. The best converter tool to use on Linux is Converseen. It has support for dozens of codecs, including HEIC/HEIF.

• Converseen isn’t installed on any Linux operating systems by default, so you’ll have to set it up yourself. To install Converseen on Linux, open up a terminal window. Once open, follow the installation instructions below to get Converseen working.

• In yesterday’s entry on a Grafana Loki cardinality issue with the metadata you can harvest from systemd log messages, I said that I thought we’d wind up dealing with the issue by sending systemd journal messages to Loki in the journal’s JSON format. This JSON format preserves all of the available fields and Loki can process it to extract them when you access the logs. Having actually tried doing this, I’ve now given up on the idea.

• In theory, sending JSON to Loki is the correct approach. JSON is the standard modern way to send a collection of information together, such as a log message and the metadata associated with it, and Loki has tools for parsing JSON, extracting the fields, and so on. In a perfect world we’d ship JSON and everything would work nicely.

• In practice, trying to use JSON formatted systemd logs today with Loki and Grafana gave me a succession of papercuts and irritations. I’m currently mostly using Grafana’s Explore feature to poke through Loki logs, and this had various issues. For example, Explore gets unhappy if there are errors in the log processing, such as if you have a mixture of JSON and non-JSON log lines so that JSON decoding fails some of the time. Explore has a handy ‘show context’ feature that shows you related log lines around the selected log, but when you have JSON logs these are in JSON because that’s the native log message. Naturally, JSON blobs are harder to skim (and take up more screen space) than the actual log messages.

• Did you ever wonder how many bytes a system service is daily receiving from the network? Thanks to systemd, we can easily account this.

• This guide targets NixOS, but the idea could be applied on any Linux system using systemd.

• This article will explain how to make the flakes enabled nix commands reusing the nixpkgs repository used as input to build your NixOS system. This will regularly save you time and bandwidth.

• The Old Computer Challenge V2 is over! What a week! It was even more than a week, as it was from 10th to 17th july included, that was 8 days.

• It’s often said Docker is not very good with regard to security, let me illustrate a simple way to get root access to your Linux system through a docker container. This may be useful for people who would have docker available to their user, but whose company doesn’t give them root access.

• This is not a Docker vulnerability being exploited, just plain Docker by design. It is not a way to become root from *within* the container, you need to be able to run docker on the host system.

• If you use this to break against your employer internal rules, this is your problem, not mine. I do write this to raise awareness about why Docker for systems users could be dangerous.

• Today we are looking at how to install MCreator 2022.1 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.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• 22.08 will be no revolutionary jump for Kate, more a nice incremental update containing a lot of small improvements and bug fixes compared to 22.04.

• If you want to dive in more deep, we have a nice list of all merge requests that give you a proper overview about the larger development tasks that did take place.

• Naturally, there are some user visible top level changes to Kate. Per default, we now have some text free left & right border with just a bit larger icons. One can naturally switch back to the old style and adjust the icon size there. The bottom status/tool button/… border got fine tuned, too.

• The second sub-activity of the first activity is swapping the number cards to make consecutive cards 10’s complements of each other. As of now (while writing the blog), there are two levels to this. The first of them consists of the four numbers to swap, and the second level consists of the five numbers to swap. Currently, in this activity, the pupil can swap two numbers by clicking on the first number and then second click on the number with whom they wish to swap. The selected card is a bit enlarged compared to others to provide click feedback and the assurance that this number is assigned. The answer is checked by whether the first pair (first and second card), second pair (third and fourth number card ), and third pair (fifth and sixth number card), if available, are 10’s complements of each other or not. If the pupil can successfully swap the numbers, they proceed to the next sub-level. Now the question arises, “WHAT IS SUB-LEVEL”?. A single level may consist of sub-levels. One has to answer all the sub-level correctly if they wish to proceed to the next level. After reading the “swap” term this many times, it is relatively indicative that the name for this must contain the word “swap.” The name for sub-activity-2 is “Swapping Ten’s Complements.”

• Akademy 2022 is almost around the corner, and I’m excited to be able to travel again after almost 3 years of Covid, lockdowns and more.

• I hope to meet all my KDE friends at the beautiful Spanish city of Barcelona, and remove the dust of my C++/QML coding skills. I do hope to be able to start a new interface for Atelier using QML, I already have most of the boilerplate from previous works, but now I want to keep it simple and clean.

Distributions and Operating Systems

• This article will explore the five best Linux distributions that do not use systemd on which you can rely in your daily job.

• Systemd has long divided the Linux community, polarizing it at both extremes – from widespread acceptance to complete denial. While both sides have valid arguments for their pros and cons, this article will look at five Linux distributions whose developers have chosen a side of not using systemd.

• But, before we get into the article’s meat, let’s briefly explain what systemd is and what it is used for.

• In Linux, there is a special process known as ID 1. It is the init process essentially in charge of starting and stopping the system. It got this ID due to being the first process to run on the system when it booted up.

• The systemd service is the process with process ID 1. It is started directly by the kernel, whereas all other services are started by systemd or one of its child processes. In short, systemd is responsible for the fundamental task of properly running your Linux system.

• Now that we’ve explained systemd and what it’s in charge of, let’s look at why it’s so controversial in the Linux community. First, we clarify that the topic is rather broad and that covering it in depth will necessitate a separate article, which we promise to deliver to our readers soon.

• So, the reasons for some people’s dislike of systemd can be divided into ideological and technical.

• When the number of entries are small enough we can store all the metadata information in inode core data itself, we call it shortform directories. My first task was to test V4 support for shortform directories aggressively, since implementation was correct and simple enough it passed all my tests. Then I tried to read V5 shortform directories and ofcourse it failed and the reason was inode core size. Xfs V4 has 256 bytes while V5 has 512 bytes inode, so the offset at which metadata is stored is different for both the versions. I implemented some helper functions to give us the correct data fork pointer based on the version of xfs and soon we were able to read V5 shortform entries, Later I did some testing and it passed all my tests.

• After that I began my work for block directory, ofcourse the number of entries would increase and we will no longer be able to store all metadata in inode itself so we use block directory and the format is changed to extents. Now things started to become interesting, there were new fields introduced in V5 block headers and I needed to elegantly handle it with V4 headers as well. PulkoMandy suggested I have two options for this: either go with virtual class or templates. I decided we will be using virtual class as it will be more consistent with our xfs code and implement as many methods as we need along with function to create class instance as per version of xfs mounted. Since now we have virtual class with vPtrs we need to be very careful with class and its on-disk structure, for example we now can’t use sizeof() operator on virtual class to match with data stored on disk, I added warnings on code about this on function which should be used instead of sizeof() operator.

• As the roadmap on how to handle both versions was clear to me I extended V5 read support for leaf, node, B+tree based directory and files as well.

Reviews

• The EndeavourOS distribution is a member of the Arch Linux family. Endeavour is a rolling release platform which strives to be easy to set up and run as a desktop operating system. The project puts a strong focus on initial customization, providing the ability to choose our desktop environment (and various extras) at install time.

• I previously reviewed EndeavourOS just over a year ago and the distribution was one of a handful which made my list of remarkably good distributions of 2021. As you might imagine, I was eager to try out the project’s latest snapshot to see how it had evolved over the past year.

• Endeavour is available as a single 1.8GB download for 64-bit (x86_64) computers. Booting from the project’s live media brings up a menu asking if we’d like to launch the distribution normally, run the live media with improved NVIDIA video support, or launch in fallback mode. The normal method worked well for me and the live media quickly loaded the Xfce desktop. The Xfce interface is arranged with a panel across the bottom of the screen. This panel holds the application menu, quick-launch icons, task switcher, and system tray.

New Releases

• The NuTyX team is happy to announce the new version of NuTyX 22.07.0 and cards 2.5.4.

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

• The xorg-server graphics server version 21.1.3, the Mesa 3D library in 22.1.4, Gtk4 4.6.6 and Qt 6.3.0.

• The python interpreters are en 3.10.5 et 2.7.18.

• The XFCE desktop environment is updated to version 4.16.0.

• The MATE desktop environment is a 1.26.0 version .

• The GNOME desktop environment is also updated to version 42.3

• The KDE desktop environment is available in Plasma 5.25.3, Framework 5.96.0 and applications in 22.04.3.

• Available browsers are: Firefox 102.0.1, Chromium 103.0.5060.134, Epiphany 42.3, etc

• Many desktop applications have been updated as well like Telegram-desktop 3.7.3, Thunderbird 102.0.3, Scribus 1.5.8, Libreoffice 7.3.4.2, Gimp 2.10.32, etc.

• Core NuTyX ships with Long Term Support (LTS) kernels: 4.14.288, 4.19.252, 5.4.206, 5.10.131 and 5.15.57 and the latest stable version 5.18.14 .

Debian Family

• Please update your browser home page, bookmarks and links from any pages you control.

• Use the new URL https://Suicide.FYI where we are continuing to document the Debian / Ubuntu culture and related suicides

• You can find the new RSS and Atom feed URLs on the same page. As the debian.community domain has been stolen, we can not rely on a redirect.

• Today, Sunday 24 July 2022, the annual Debian Developers and Contributors Conference came to a close. Hosting more than 210 attendees from 38 different countries over a combined 91 event talks, discussion sessions, Birds of a Feather (BoF) gatherings, workshops, and activities, DebConf22 was a large success.

• The conference was preceded by the annual DebCamp held 10 July to 16 July which focused on individual work and team sprints for in-person collaboration towards developing Debian. In particular, this year there have been sprints to advance development of Mobian/Debian on mobile, reproducible builds and Python in Debian, and a BootCamp for newcomers, to get introduced to Debian and have some hands-on experience with using it and contributing to the community.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

• While DebConf 22 and GUADEC are happening, some more things happened, which is impressive considering the inactivity heat waves cause.

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

Programming/Development

• Previously I built a REST API, deployed it into a container and got it all running on AWS as a Lambda. But setting this up involved just clicking around in AWS and occasionally using the AWS CLI.

• Today, I’m going to port that whole setup to Terraform so that its easier to manage, reproduce, and make changes to. ( These are the purported benefits of Terraform, or so my coworker Corey tells me. I’ve never used it before so I’ll be learning as I go. )

• Read this to learn about Terraform from a noob’s perspective. The specifics of my infrastructure import may not be relevant to you, but hopefully my thinking process and take-aways will be.

• Ok, follow along with me as import my infrastructure into Terraform.

• The Raspberry PI Pico W added a WiFi connection to the microcontroller from RPI Foundation, enabling our projects to connect to the internet world

• This tutorial will show you how to use WiFi with Raspberry PI Pico.

• With the release of Raspberry PI Pico W, adding the Infineon CYW4343 module to the RP2040-based microcontroller enabled us to get connected to 2.4GHz WiFi networks. It has been a big step, as before this evolution only a few microcontrollers were able to get connected with a WiFi connection and this makes the Pico usable in smart things projects.

Leftovers

• I first discovered sarcasm as a freshman in college, which I realize makes me a bit of a late bloomer as far as teenagers go. There were certain classmates who seemed to always come across as clever and funny no matter the topic. Over time I noticed there was a simple formula to their contributions and it was pretty easy to mimic. It could be as simple as responding with the opposite emotion as one might expect, feigning joy at bad news and heartbreak at good. On more complex topics it could be as simple as just repeating something someone else said but in a sarcastic tone.

• I decided to give it a shot.

• At first being sarcastic was incredibly satisfying. Whereas previously I might have made an earnest argument or asked a question, I now seemed to be able to jump right to the part where the group appreciated me and my contribution. What is even more impressive is it required very little thought to execute. I could often get a positive reaction even on topics I knew almost nothing about.

• As it relates to blogging, I’ve seen encouragement to Just Publish It™️. Matt says just put stuff out there while Chris adds that there is no bar for the quality of a blog post.

• I agree. I enjoy Matt’s and Chris’ approaches to blogging and I subscribe to and read both.

• But, I have an itching asterisk I want to attach to my agreement. I can’t quite put my finger on what it is. It has a personal bent to it, like “I like that generally, but not for myself specifically” kind of thing.

• Personally I tend towards the “don’t publish it, it’s not good enough” end of the spectrum. For example, I currently have fifty — that’s right 50 — blog post drafts. Some are quite long, full of disjointed thoughts and commentary in need of an edit. Others are quite short, containing a punchy thought in need of expansion and nuance. And if I have to guess how many of those posts will publish, I would say maybe ten at most.

• Why? I don’t think they’re good enough. I’m not sure what I mean by “good enough”, hence this post. I think what I mean is: they’re thoughts that don’t go anywhere and I don’t know where to take them. Some run in circles, seeking to go somewhere but never going anywhere. Others run contrary to some prevailing wisdom, then stop, offering no alternative suggestion or an accompanying rationale.

Science

• When the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) reveals its first images on 12 July, they will be the by-product of carefully crafted mirrors and scientific instruments. But all of its data-collecting prowess would be moot without the spacecraft’s communications subsystem.

• The Webb’s comms aren’t flashy. Rather, the data and communication systems are designed to be incredibly, unquestionably dependable and reliable. And while some aspects of them are relatively new—it’s the first mission to use Ka-band frequencies for such high data rates so far from Earth, for example—above all else, JWST’s comms provide the foundation upon which JWST’s scientific endeavors sit.

• As previous articles in this series have noted, JWST is parked at Lagrange point L2. It’s a point of gravitational equilibrium located about 1.5 million kilometers beyond Earth on a straight line between the planet and the sun. It’s an ideal location for JWST to observe the universe without obstruction and with minimal orbital adjustments.

• A new generation of artificial intelligence (AI) models can produce “creative” images on-demand based on a text prompt. The likes of Imagen, MidJourney, and DALL-E 2 are beginning to change the way creative content is made with implications for copyright and intellectual property.

• While the output of these models is often striking, it’s hard to know exactly how they produce their results. Last week, researchers in the US made the intriguing claim that the DALL-E 2 model might have invented its own secret language to talk about objects.

Hardware

• Qualcomm has redesigned its silicon designed for wearable devices such as smart watches and activity trackers to launch what it’s calling the Snapdragon W5+ wearable platform. These designs are completely new and hopefully will help the makers of every other smart watch that isn’t an Apple Watch finally compete against the Cupertino-designed device.

• The new Qualcomm silicon embraces the concept of an ambient mode, offloading several sensing and other processes to co-processors that save on power without sacrificing performance. The design takes sensors such as heart rate and microphones for voice activation and embeds them on an always-on microprocessor. Qualcomm has also put a smaller GPU on this always-on chip so the screen gets cool visuals in ambient mode. Finally, it has put notifications and audio playback on this lower performance, low-power always-on processor to save on battery life.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• Thoughts on the “gay community” and Monkeypox as “experts” recommend vaccination to gay men first.

• WARNING: This post will be controversial and likely offensive to LGBT people. I’m gay myself, and I don’t like what I’m seeing, and I really wish I didn’t feel compelled to talk about this.

• I consider myself to be the product of when we could still sit down and watch hard-hitting fact-based journalism, and talk about things like adults, without a total media circus, or worry that someone will take offense to facts.

• George Carlin warned about “soft language” in a video from a long time ago that I believe everyone should watch. It hasn’t gotten any better.

• So, I’ve sat down and thought a little bit about Monkeypox and how it spreads. I’ve decided that I won’t be getting my vaccine in the foreseeable future.

Security

Privacy/Surveillance

• Artificial intelligence experts and ethicists are urging caution about potential adverse effects of using the latest generation of artificial intelligence (AI) agents to simulate the expressions of people who have died. The issue is gaining attention after recent demonstrations of text- and voice-based machine learning models built on natural language processing. Like the use of deepfakes in online videos, the trend presents a minefield of moral quandaries.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Speculation surrounding Scott Morrison’s post-parliamentary ambitions includes the possibility of a job with the Australian Rugby League. His involvement with the sport poses plenty of questions, including the grants largesse that defined his time as PM. Investigation by #Mate.

• Scott Morrison went to the footy the day after his ”miracle” election win in 2019. The image of a triumphant Coalition prime minister waving his blue Cronulla Sharks cap to the home crowd at Shark Park in Woolooware jarred with everyone who had expected the election to send a dysfunctional government packing.

• Morrison’s indulgence of the Cronulla Sharks was deft. It certainly fitted his well-crafted image, the private schoolboy from Sydney’s eastern suburbs presented as the daggy dad from middle-class Australian heartland. That image was cultivated, but not necessarily any more insincere than the Aussie-battler image cultivated by the Labor leaders who hobnob with the captains of business and other plutocrats.

• Koch Industries spent $3.1 million in the first three months of the Trump administration, largely to ensure confirmation of Scott Pruitt as head of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

Civil Rights/Policing

• When it comes to corporate power and control over their lives, now and into the future, today’s college students are perilously dormant. When it comes to putting pressure on Congress to counter the various dictates of corporatism, there is little activity other than some stalwarts contacting their lawmakers on climate violence.

• Much of campus activity these days focuses on diversity, tuition, student loans, “politically correct” speech demands and conforming conduct.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• Today, an email landed on the AFRINIC Resource Policy Discussion list, in which a subscriber accuses the CEO of AFRINIC, Eddy Kayihura, of trying to ask a governmental body to interfere with AFRINIC’s independent procedure for electing Board Directors.

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal

• I sometimes write music, and today I finished writing some music, so I wanted to share. Whenever someone listens to stuff I create, it gives me additional happiness points! Who knows, maybe one day I will level up to craete a whole album.

• [...]

• Thank you, team Ardour, I really love this DAW.

• (Compiling it required a dirty hack. If you try to compile version 6.9.0 and it fails, let me know, I will share my dirty hack.)

• The best car setup is a compromise. You want grip for the twisty parts and speed for the straights, but more of one gives you less of the other. Ferrari went with grip, and Red Bull went with speed. It seemed like Verstappen would be easily able to pass Leclerc on the long French straights. But that didn’t happen. Verstappen could stay with Leclerc, but never looked like passing. So Red Bull stopped Verstappen early. Fresh tyres should have got them an advantage, and it seemed like it was working. Leclerc would come out of his pit stop behind. Then we’d have had another race where Leclerc needed to overtake on track for the win. But instead he spun into the tyre barrier and Verstappen had an easy win. Leclerc said “I was thinking too much and I lost the rear.” Ouch.

Technical

• Gov’t pushing for BankID completely unquestioned. Everyone needs a Google account to be a citizen, is where we’re headed.

• 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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