● 08.08.22

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 08/08/2022: Rescuezilla 2.4 and GUADEC Notes

Posted in News Roundup at 4:29 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

• Blog posts about the progress of Nemo Mobile and Manjaro ARM and this and that.

• This has been a really great week for Linux news and release despite being the season of summer holidays. Ubuntu 20.04 LTS users got a newer Linux kernel from Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, KDE Plasma desktop fans received a new update with lots of goodies, Slax Linux returned to its roots, and Peppermint OS now offers a Devuan-based flavor for software freedom lovers.

• On top of that, I show you how to install Linux kernel 5.19 on Ubuntu, upgrade your Linux Mint 20.3 installations to Linux Mint 21, and take a look at the upcoming Fedora Linux 37 release on Raspberry Pi 4.

• Welcome to this week’s Linux weekly roundup. We had a solid week in the world of Linux releases with Q4OS 4.10, Robolinux 12.07, and Peppermint OS 08-02-2022.

Audiocasts/Shows

• I just upgraded to Linux Mint 21! Let’s take a look around. For more about Linux Mint

• **kgpg** , **kguiaddons** , **khangman** , **khelpcenter** , **kholidays** , **khotkeys** , **khtml** , **ki18n** from Slackware set **kde**.

• Sway is where I think you should go to Wayland for day to day use but there are so many other compositors out there and one of them is Cage which calls it self a Wayland kiosk.

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

• We have just sent out the First Major Patch since the release of MakuluLinux Shift, This patch addresses a VERY annoying issue that I am sure many would be happy to see patched. Please see video for more details.

• We present a buffet of budget Linux boxes. From $40 to $400 you’ll be surprised by what we found. Then we attempt to find the perfect distro for them.

• Sean asks about licenses, David saves money on hardware using Linux, Carlos uses RAID1 and Bill plans a Linux-powered career switch

• Josh and Kurt talk about a tweet from @kmcquade3 asking the question “What’s a concept in security that is generally accepted as true but is actually bull%$#*?” How many of the replies make sense? Most of them do. We go over some of the best replies as fast as we can.

Applications

• Being an eye candy music widget (or controller).

• That’s the only focus of Sunamu, and it does its job pretty well.

• Sunamu is an intriguing tool. It is not a music player but lets you display the music you’re playing and control it.

• I’m not a fan of having a floating widget on my primary workspace, but Sunamu’s minimal yet elegant approach changed my mind!

• So, I will walk you through its features, installation, configuration tweaks, and my experience with it.

Instructionals/Technical

• When a Linux partition is encrypted, access to the partition’s stored data and storage space is inapplicable to users who do not have the right access/authorization. The same Linux partition can only be termed as decrypted if direct access to it is authorized.

• The authorization/decryption phase requires the user accessing the locked partition to provide a matching encryption key used to lock access to it.

• This guide will walk you through installing Spotify on Fedora Linux, offering you three different ways to do it by following best practices.

• Spotify is a well-known cross-platform music streaming service that millions of people use. It is compatible with most modern systems, including Linux, Windows, and macOS, as well as Android and iOS devices.

• The application’s free edition offers limited audio streaming features with advertising. However, the premium service includes various benefits, such as downloading music, ad-free browsing, improved sound quality, and more.

• Unfortunately, Spotify is not available in the official Fedora Linux repositories. However, there is an easy way for Fedora users to install Spotify on their Linux systems.

• While working with a remote connection, it’s quite common to get into a situation where you are not able to interact with the remote system.

• And it is a frustrating moment when a remote SSH connection hangs after several minutes of unused connection, or perhaps even due to internet fluctuations.

• There might be many other reasons for the above cause, but it’s quite easy to kill an unresponsive SSH connection without killing the current shell.

• If you’re sharing files between two users over the network or “sneaker net” (saving a file to a hard drive and copying it to a computer), you may encounter permission errors when you try to read or write the file. Even if you understand the concept of file permissions, you may not know exactly how to diagnose the problem or solve it. I used to perform data migration as a service, so I’ve run into my fair share of permission errors and ownership conflicts. Here’s how I fix them fast.

• Thanks to the Apache Foundation for the development and maintenance of Apache Tomcat, RHEL 8 users can now proudly boast of having access to an open-source, powerful, lightweight, and popular web server.

• Apache Tomcat prioritizes the execution of java web-based applications through a pure Java HTTP server interface implemented by Java WebSocket, JavaServer Pages (JSP), Java Expression Language (EL), and Java Servlet technologies.

• This article will walk us through the installation and configuration of Apache Tomcat 10 on RHEL 8 distribution.

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Brave Browser on Linux Mint 21. For those of you who didn’t know, Brave is a free, open-source web browser developed by Brave Software, Inc. It is a secure and fast web browser whose base code is very much similar to the Chromium browser. Brave is designed to block ads and website trackers by default and guarantee privacy.

• 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 a Brave Browser on Linux Mint 21 (Vanessa).

• Today we are looking at two ways to Stream a Windows computer on a Chromebook. Please take note that both methods are paid, as the company need to pay for the actual hardware and licenses.

• Whether you want to bring new changes into effect or resolve minor glitches, it’s easy to restart your computer based on Windows, macOS, Linux, or Chrome OS operating system. We’ll show you how to do that.

• PiBuddy is an open-source Android application for Raspberry Pi to control the device from mobile. Apart from giving you the authority to control your Raspberry Pi, you can also view system information like CPU resources, disk usage, and memory information, as well as the freedom to turn on and off your device at any time. Thus, it saves your device from improper shutdown.

• In this article, we will guide you on how you can use the PiBuddy application on your mobile to control your Raspberry Pi device.

• Odoo is an open-source business management tool designed to meet the company requirements, as it includes various business tools such as CRM, eCommerce, project management, accounting, and much more. Odoo operates under relational database management systems like PostgreSQL, and it works smoothly on several Linux-based platforms like Ubuntu and Raspberry Pi.

• In this article, we will show you how to install Odoo on your Raspberry Pi.

• uget is a fast and lightweight download manager that quickly downloads files on your Raspberry Pi device. It even gives you the option to download multiple files all at once and if you need to download files at a quick pace, you can queue them for faster downloading.

• Controlling a Raspberry Pi from another system through a VNC viewer is extremely important as it helps you easily control your Raspberry Pi device through your laptop without purchasing a separate desktop environment. In another case, you can also benefit other individuals by using your device to complete their projects. However, the default VNC viewer setting allows you to access the device within the same network as it becomes extremely tough for the users outside your network to access it.

• If you are looking for a solution to remotely access your Raspberry Pi device outside the network or in any part of the world, you should look for these article guidelines.

• Installing and configuring SSH in your Linux systems is not the end game. Using SSH to access your systems remotely goes beyond that. You will need to ensure that you enable your SSH to establish a connection.

• But this is impossible to accomplish if you do not understand how SSH works. Notably, you need a client machine and a host or server to initiate and accomplish an SSH connection. Both sides must agree based on the provided credentials to enable a secure connection and access between the two sides.

• In this article, we will outline how you can enable an SSH connection in Linux systems. But before that, it is vital to note that the client machine needs the remote host credentials or information to initiate the connection. This information could be an IP address or hostname.

• Discord is one of the most popular messaging apps that enable users to connect with the community worldwide. It allows you to do text messaging, voice messaging, video calling and media sharing with your friends and people all over the globe. Even there are hundreds of groups you can join on Discord to discuss several important topics.

• Since Discord is an open-source platform, you can install it easily on any Linux platform; however, on Raspberry Pi, you cannot directly install this app because it’s not available for ARM-based architecture. To install Discord on Raspberry Pi, you should follow this article, as we will show you the easiest ways to install the app on your device.

• In this tutorial, you will learn how to install Owncloud Desktop client on Debian / Ubuntu. This step is important to get the most out of the tool.

• In a recent post I have explained you how to install Owncloud on Ubuntu 22.04 It is a good idea to start with that post.

Desktop Environments/WMs

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• It was really lovely to get back to GUADEC. I loved being around old friends and meeting the new faces within the project. The venue was stellar and I thoroughly enjoyed a lot of the talks this year.

• For me, my favorite talks were the progressive webapps talk by Phaedrus Leeds, Federico’s meme-filled talk on accessibility, and Rob’s talk about the Endless deployment to Oaxaca, Mexico.

• [Note: I hope someone goes back to the youtube videos and adds timestamps / links to all the talks. It would be easier to find and browse them. ]

• On my part, I gave a talk on GNOME Crosswords and participated on a panel on how to get a Job with Free Software. The crosswords talk in particular seemed pretty successful. It had a great article written about it in lwn.net (thanks Jake!), which lead to an increase in bug reports and crossword contributions.

• One observation: it felt that attendance was down this year. I don’t know if it was Covid or Mexico, but some combination led to a smaller crowd than usual. I saw that there was a mini-GUADEC in Berlin as well (which I’ll assume was a lagging indicator of the above and not a cause.)

Distributions and Operating Systems

• Getting ready to build the next 64-bit release of EasyOS, have been working on a few things and not documenting. So, had better report some of it…

Reviews

• Linux Mint is one of the better known, beginner-friendly Linux distributions. The project’s main branch is based on Ubuntu’s long-term support (LTS) releases with an alternative branch based on Debian. The project’s main branch is further split into three editions: Cinnamon, MATE, and Xfce.

• The latest version of Mint features a handful of key features. This long-term support release will be maintained through to 2027. It includes a new rebase of the Muffin window manager to import improvements from the upstream Mutter window manager. It also includes a switch from the Blueberry Bluetooth software to Blueman for better cross-desktop support. This release also includes a process monitor which will let us know when automated tasks are running in the background and may impact system performance. A few other improvements and cosmetic changes are mentioned in the project’s What’s New document.

• I downloaded the Cinnamon edition of Linux Mint 21 which is approximately 2.8GB in size. Booting from this media brings up a menu asking if we want to launch the live desktop, launch the desktop in compatibility mode (in case of video card issues), or launch the OEM installer. Taking the default quickly launched the Cinnamon desktop. On the desktop we find icons for launching the file manager and system installer. At the bottom of the display is a panel where we can find the application menu, task switcher, and system tray. The system was responsive and my hardware worked fairly well out of the box so I dived into installing the distribution.

Fedora Family / IBM

Debian Family

• A new release 0.2.11 of RcppCCTZ is now on CRAN.

• RcppCCTZ uses Rcpp to bring CCTZ to R. CCTZ is a C++ library for translating between absolute and civil times using the rules of a time zone. In fact, it is two libraries. One for dealing with civil time: human-readable dates and times, and one for converting between between absolute and civil times via time zones. And while CCTZ is made by Google(rs), it is not an official Google product. The RcppCCTZ page has a few usage examples and details. This package was the first CRAN package to use CCTZ; by now four others packages include its sources too. Not ideal, but beyond our control.

• The GNU libc version 2.34 has just been accepted into unstable. Getting it ready has been more challenging than other versions, as this version integrates a few libraries (libpthread, libdl, libutil, libanl) into libc.

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

•  Rescuezilla 2.4 is here more than seven months after Rescuezilla 2.3 and it has a brand-new base derived from the Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (Jammy Jellyfish) operating system series to provide users with the best possible hardware support. The previous release was based on Ubuntu 21.10 (Impish Indri), which reached end of life in July 2022.

• Apart from being based on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, Rescuezilla 2.4 also comes with several new features, including the ability to compress images using the bzip2 algorithm and the ability to set a custom SSH port.

Devices/Embedded

• Shenzhen Xunlong Software has released a 10.1-inch LCD touchscreen for the company’s Orange Pi 4 single board computer powered by a Rockchip RK3399 hexa-core Cortex-A72/A53 processor.

• The MIPI DSI display is based on Ilitek ILI9881c panel controller supported in mainline Linux, offers 1280×800 resolution, and besides working with the original Orange Pi 4, it’s also compatible with Orange Pi 4B (with AI accelerator) and the more recent Orange Pi 4 LTS SBC launched earlier this year.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

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.

GNU Projects

• GNU PSPP is a program for the statistical analysis of sampled data. It is a Free replacement for the proprietary program SPSS, and appears very similar to it with a few exceptions.

• The most important of these exceptions are, that there are no “time bombs”; your copy of PSPP will not “expire” or deliberately stop working in the future.

• Neither are there any artificial limits on the number of cases or variables which you can use. There are no additional packages to purchase in order to get “advanced” functions; all functionality that PSPP currently supports is in the core package.

• PSPP is a stable and reliable application. It can perform descriptive statistics, T-tests, anova, linear and logistic regression, measures of association, cluster analysis, reliability and factor analysis, non-parametric tests and more.

Programming/Development

Python

• In this guide, we’ll show you how to install Plotly Dash on your Linux system. You must have Python installed on your system Dash.

• In this guide, We will learn how to use the Python IDLE shell to figure out percentages. You can use any IDE you want because the logic doesn’t change.

• “We need to employ a lot of modules while creating Python apps for various functionalities. The number of modules a given application uses can be considerable. Generally, it is advised to create a virtual environment tailored to the project when developing such massive programs, as well as smaller ones, because doing so enables us to install anything we want and of any version without overburdening the available package space. The script and dependencies must be installed on the user’s computers for them to utilize the developer. Because the dependencies are set up in a virtual environment, it would be useless to share the entire virtual environment because the folder size would be enormous, and there would be a risk of integrity problems.

• When this occurs, programmers include a requirements.txt file in the project that contains a list of all the dependencies that have been installed in the virtual environment as well as information on the version that is being utilized. To utilize the program, the borrower or end-user merely needs to set up a virtual environment and install any necessary components. This post will explain how to create the requirements.txt file and install dependencies using it.”

• “The interpretation of command line arguments has been made by the use of the Python module argparse. By providing user input elements to be processed, argparse would be used to give customization and reuse of the program in place of explicitly specifying variables within the function.”

• According to the aggregated statistics, a choropleth map is a statistical map comprised of colored polygons. It is mainly applied in geographical areas, such as countries, states, counties, and postal codes. When working with statistical analysis, you often encounter scenarios where you must plot a choropleth map.

• Therefore, this article will discuss how you can create a choropleth Mapbox using Plotly’s graph_objects.

• A choropleth map, or Choropleth for short, is a map made up of colored polygons that describe data. This tutorial will cover how to create a choropleth map using go.Choropleth.

Leftovers

Security

Privacy/Surveillance

• Channel state information (CSI) leverages carrier signal strength, amplitude, phase, and signal delay indicators to reveal the signal scattering, reflection, and power attenuation phenomena that occur with the carrier as the transmission distance changes. This is typically used to measure the channel status of the wireless network in Wi-Fi communication, but it’s also possible to analyze and study the changes in CSI to detect movements such as walking and running of people or animals, and Espressif claims it can also capture subtle movements caused by small movements such as breathing and chewing of people or animals in a static environment.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• Internet email is becoming more reliant on DKIM, a scheme for having mail servers cryptographically sign emails. The Big Email providers have started silently spambinning messages that lack either DKIM signatures, or SPF. DKIM is arguably less broken than SPF, so I wanted to deploy it.

• But it has a problem: if done in a naive way, it makes all your emails non-repudiable, forever. This is not really a desirable property – at least, not desirable for you, although it can be nice for someone who (for example) gets hold of leaked messages obtained by hacking mailboxes.

• This problem was described at some length in Matthew Green’s article Ok Google: please publish your DKIM secret keys. Following links from that article does get you to a short script to achieve key rotation but it had a number of problems, and wasn’t useable in my context.

Gemini* and Gopher

Technical

• Schmiddi recently wrote about their experience with keeping a zettelkasten and evaluates how useful it has been to them so far. Recently, I have been adding and editing dozens of zettels to my kasten daily as I digest a massive amount of in-depth reading for a class I am teaching next semester. During this process I have been thinking a lot about how much I appreciate this method, so I thought I would share my two cents about the potential utility of a zettelkasten and how to get the most out of it.

• (I spent a lot of time looking for Gemini Program pics specifically because of Gem Space. Gem Space has a lot of zine/DIY energy that I love)

• I just got done cold e-mailing some people. Bloggers. Mostly from blogroll.org. Because I want to pick their brain and see what makes them “tick”, write, do stuff, in general.

• Some can be responsive, some prefer not to be bothered – and so it goes

• M.p is a jam, though, because people here are fairly cool, nice (don’t enforce the karmic forces on me, Murphy’s Law!). I like it here.

• So, now, I think of how I am resetting. Resetting in life, really. It’s been four months since I spoke to some toxic people in my life, and I continue to de-rut myself from that noxious mindset.

Science

• It turns out the process of making nitrogen rich mulch for use in gardening is very simple, and has been done for a very long time. All you need is pee, wood chips or biomatter, and wood ashes. There is a mechanism built into creation that governs decomposition of living matter. It has to do with the balance between carbon, and nitrogen. If you have even seen a compost pile steaming, what you are seeing is the carbon, nitrogen, moisture, and biomatter ratios reach the right balance to start creating heat to accelerate the breakdown of the materials. These temperatures can actually reach 140 degrees F. In fact, people have done experiments with heating water using compost piles.

Internet/Gemini

• After I launched the new version of my capsule last Saturday, I received two emails! One person was responding to a question I put forth in a gemlog entry, and another person just said they liked the format. Knowing that people read what you are writing is a nice feeling.

• Both of the emails were just a few sentences and a signature. I’m used to thinking about email as a medium for multi-paragraph communications, with an introduction, a body, and a conclusion… I myself have only emailed people about content on their capsules a few times, but I definitely felt the pressure to make it a “proper” email. Maybe seeing these examples will help me email more informally.

• Offpunk, previously known as AV-98-offline, is a new command line based and offline-first Gemini client. Its primary goal is to be able to browse the Gemini space while being entirely offline. Synchronisation is done non-interactively.

Programming

• C programming language has concept of separate compilation which means that it is possible to have program source in multiple files, compile them separately and than link them together into final executable file. This way each individual source file have manageable size and only files changed need to be recompiled. But it comes at price of losing opportunities for code size and performance optimizations.

• 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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